Condition monitoring benefit for onshore wind turbines: sensitivity to operational parameters

Abstract

The economic case for condition monitoring (CM) applied to wind turbines is currently not well quantified and the factors involved are not fully understood. In order to make more informed decisions regarding whether deployment of CM for wind turbines is economically justified, a refined set of probabilistic models capturing the processes involved are presented. Sensitivity of the model outputs with respect to variables of interest are investigated within the bounds of published data and expert opinion. The results show that the levels of benefit are dependent on a variety of factors including wind profile, typical downtime duration and wind turbine sub-component replacement cost

Towards Reliability Centred Maintenance of Wind Turbines

“…Data from operational wind farms are used to populate the model in order to establish an optimal maintenance policy. Similar studies can be found in [6,7,8] which deal with different aspects of the problem such as specific component parts or the effect of seasonal weather patterns.…”

“…The quantities -including annual cost of maintenance per wind turbine (CM WT ) and annual cost of maintenance per MW (CM MW ) -were calculated using equations (3) - (6).…”

Intelligent Collaborative Quality Assurance System for Wind Turbine Supply Chain Management

“…McMillan and Ault then selected four component categories from these multiple sources and illustrated their annual probability of failure on the same chart [17]. They further used this data to study reliability benchmarks [18]. This paper summarizes their researches in Figure 7 to illustrate the effect of both the failure probability and downtime distribution of four components of wind turbines, namely the electronics & controls, rotor blades, gearbox and generator.…”

Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to the Reliability Centered Maintenance Method for Transmission Systems

“…Randomly initialize the particles of the population and iteration counter (iter=0). Note that the velocity and position of each particle needs to be initialized in such a manner that each candidate solution (particle) locates within the feasible search space given by (3). Since the maintenance strategy particles are integers, their denormalized value is rounded to nearest integer to determine the actual value.…”

“…Whereas this approach has the advantages of simple scheduling and high availability, it is not the most cost effective. In recent years, new maintenance scheduling techniques involving condition monitoring have been proposed [1][2][3]. The goal has been in the development of new maintenance strategies, such as the Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) method, which can retain system reliability while reduce maintenance costs.…”