An opportunistic condition-based maintenance strategy for offshore wind farm based on predictive analytics

Abstract

The reduction of operation and maintenance cost plays a significant role in decreasing the cost of energy generated by offshore wind farm, which can be realized through better design of maintenance strategy. This paper proposes a dynamic opportunistic condition-based maintenance strategy for offshore wind farm by using predictive analytics. In the strategy, a new maintenance basis is developed by considering the varying maintenance lead time to make maintenance decisions for different wind turbine components. Meanwhile, the strategy also considers the economic dependence between the wind turbines and the components. We then present a maintenance model to derive the optimal maintenance plans for various turbine components under different weather and operation load conditions. A numerical example is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the maintenance model. It is found that the varying maintenance lead time has a significant effect on the annual maintenance cost which demonstrates the reasonableness of our proposed maintenance basis. Compared to the widely employed and the simple maintenance strategies, the proposed strategy can help reduce the annual maintenance cost by 39.24% and 32.46% respectively.