A Study of Wind Turbine Performance Decline with Age through Operation Data Analysis

Raymond Byrne,Neil J Hewitt,Francesco Castellani,Davide Astolfi

doi:10.3390/en13082086

Raymond Byrne, Neil J Hewitt + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/en13082086

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Abstract

Ageing of technical systems and machines is a matter of fact. It therefore does not come as a surprise that an energy conversion system such as a wind turbine, which in particular operates under non-stationary conditions, is subjected to performance decline with age. The present study presents an analysis of the performance deterioration with age of a Vestas V52 wind turbine, installed in 2005 at the Dundalk Institute of Technology campus in Ireland. The wind turbine has operated from October 2005 to October 2018 with its original gearbox, that has subsequently been replaced in 2019. Therefore, a key point of the present study is that operation data spanning over thirteen years have been analysed for estimating how the performance degrades in time. To this end, one of the most innovative approaches for wind turbine performance control and monitoring has been employed: a multivariate Support Vector Regression with Gaussian Kernel, whose target is the power output of the wind turbine. Once the model has been trained with a reference data set, the performance degradation is assessed by studying how the residuals between model estimates and measurements evolve. Furthermore, a power curve analysis through the binning method has been performed to estimate the Annual Energy Production variations and suggests that the most convenient strategy for the test case wind turbine (running the gearbox until its end of life) has indeed been adopted. Summarizing, the main results of the present study are as follows: over a ten-year period, the performance of the wind turbine has declined of the order of 5%; the performance deterioration seems to be nonlinear as years pass by; after the gearbox replacement, a fraction of performance deterioration has been recovered, though not all because the rest of the turbine system has been operating for thirteen years from its original state. Finally, it should be noted that the estimate of performance decline is basically consistent with the few results available in the literature.

Highlights

The worldwide installed wind capacity has increased rapidly over recent years and decades [1,2].This has resulted in an ever increasing number of older industrial wind farms, on a global scale, reaching an age where major component replacements and re-powering are on the horizon.It is remarkable that most of the attention about wind turbines aging regards the reliability [3,4,5]and the failure rates [6], instead of the performance decline
The present study aims to make a contribution to the objective of a data-driven comprehension of how the performance of wind turbines deteriorate with age
Wind turbines are typically equipped with cup anemometers mounted behind the rotor and the undisturbed wind speed is ex-post reconstructed through a nacelle transfer function; The power curve has non-trivial seasonal and ambient conditions dependence

Summary

Introduction

The worldwide installed wind capacity has increased rapidly over recent years and decades [1,2].This has resulted in an ever increasing number of older industrial wind farms, on a global scale, reaching an age where major component replacements and re-powering are on the horizon.It is remarkable that most of the attention about wind turbines aging regards the reliability [3,4,5]and the failure rates [6], instead of the performance decline. The worldwide installed wind capacity has increased rapidly over recent years and decades [1,2]. This has resulted in an ever increasing number of older industrial wind farms, on a global scale, reaching an age where major component replacements and re-powering are on the horizon. The failure rates [6], instead of the performance decline This in some senses is a bit surprising for at least two reasons: all technical systems are subjected to deterioration and there is no theoretical. Energies 2020, 13, 2086 model about wind turbine performance deterioration with time, which is not due only to increasing failure rates but as well to aerodynamic performance and conversion efficiency decline. There is an impressive amount of scientific literature about the use of wind turbine SCADA data for condition monitoring [7], fault diagnosis [8]

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