From wind conditions to operational strategy: Optimal planning of wind turbine damage progression over its lifetime

Abstract

Abstract. Renewable energies have an entirely different cost structure than fossil fuel-based electricity generation. This is mainly due to the operation at zero marginal cost, whereas for fossil fuel plants, the fuel itself is a major driver of the entire cost of energy. For a wind turbine, most of the materials and resources are spent up front. Over its lifetime, this initial capital and material investment is converted into usable energy. Therefore, it is desirable to gain the maximum benefit from the utilized materials for each individual turbine over its entire operating lifetime. Material usage is closely linked to individual damage progression of various turbine components and their respective failure modes. Within this work, we present a novel approach for an optimal long-term planning of the operation of wind energy systems over their entire lifetime. It is based on a process for setting up a mathematical optimization problem that optimally distributes the available damage budget of a given failure mode over the entire lifetime. The complete process ranges from an adaptation of real-time wind turbine control to the evaluation of long-term goals and requirements. During this process, relevant deterministic external conditions and real-time controller setpoints influence the damage progression with equal importance. Finally, the selection of optimal planning strategies is based on an economic evaluation. The method is applied to an example for demonstration. It shows the high potential of the approach for an effective damage reduction on different use cases. The focus of the example is to effectively reduce power of a turbine under conditions where high loads are induced from wake-induced turbulence of neighbouring turbines. Through the optimization approach, the damage budget can be saved or spent under conditions where it pays off most in the long-term perspective. This way, it is possible to gain more energy from a given system and thus to reduce cost and ecological impact by a better usage of materials.

Maximizing value through optimized annual selection of Pareto-optimal wind turbine operating strategies

“…Other metrics or other components can be used with similar results. For ease of reproducibility, fatigue load increments for multiple failure modes based on results of 10 min simulations of the turbine with adaptable controller are provided in [8]. This data covers step one completely and step two partially.…”

Operational Wind Turbine Blade Damage Evaluation Based on 10-min SCADA and 1 Hz Data

“…To have an absolute damage evaluating tool, in addition to the calibration of the damage model, other factors influencing the damage behavior must be considered, notably the impact of the running regime on the WTB damage. In the literature, it appears that the current damage models only focus on a specific running regime [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]15,29,43,53,54]. However, according to them, each running regime does matter in the WTB damage evaluation field.…”

Optimal operation of dielectric elastomer wave energy converters under harmonic and stochastic excitation

“…Instead, the decision making should automatically adapt to the current system state. Since we consider accumulated damage as our second objective in order to maximize the DEG‐WEC lifetime, the decision making strategy can be borrowed from [25], in which active control of the residual useful lifetime via a selection of Pareto points for wind energy systems is presented. Let us assume we have to design optimal operational strategies not for a single WEC, but for an entire farm of WEC.…”

“…This additional degree of freedom can be used to control long‐time goals such as predictable residual lifetime taking into account past system operating conditions. For wind energy harvesting, this idea is described in detail in [25]. A simple switching heuristic has been presented in [15], already.…”