A numerical method to transfer an onshore wind turbine FMEA to offshore operational conditions

Abstract

Failure Modes Effect Analysis (FMEA), or more specifically, Failure Modes Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) has been accepted as an effective condition monitoring assessment tool used widely by the mili-tary, traditional industries and reliability relevant engineering systems. A successful FMEA assists to identity, evaluate and report component failure modes, their severity and impact on the systems. FMEA has been al-ready applied to onshore wind turbines, but there is a lack of offshore wind turbine applications. FMEA can be quantified by using the metric of Risk Priority Number (RPN), defined as the product of the levels of event severity, occurrence frequency and detectability. This paper presents an approach that allows the application of RPN to offshore wind energy by identifying correction factors to existing onshore RPN values taken from previous research. This approach estimates offshore failure rates for key wind turbine components from onshore data.