A Reliability Model for a Doubly Fed Induction Generator Based Wind Turbine Unit Considering Auxiliary Components

Abstract

Now-a-days, wind energy has gained significant attention to produce electric power because of energy and environment crisis worldwide. Due to advantages of doubly fed induction generator (DFIG), a noticeable percentage of wind turbines have been built based on DFIG. Due to the growing contribution of wind turbines in energy production, reliability of electricity produced by wind turbines is highly dependent on the reliability of each wind turbine unit (WTG). This paper presents an accurate model for calculating the DFIG based wind unit reliability based on reliability of its components. The reliability calculations of a WTGs based on conventional methods suffer shortcomings such as high computational burden and low accuracy due to their simplifying assumptions. Thus, a more accurate method has been proposed here to calculate the reliability based on Markov process by defining the absorbing states for a WTG. Also, relations for calculating Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of the WTG are derived and formulated.