Analysis of a State Degradation Model and Preventive Maintenance Strategies for Wind Turbine Generators Based on Stochastic Differential Equations

Abstract

Preventive maintenance is widely used in wind turbine equipment to ensure their safe and reliable operation, and this mainly includes time-based maintenance (TBM) and condition-based maintenance (CBM). Most wind farms only use TBM as the main maintenance strategy in engineering practice. Although this can meet certain reliability requirements, it cannot fully utilize the characteristics of TBM and CBM. For this, a state model based on the stochastic differential equation (SDE) is established in this paper to describe the spatio-temporal evolution process of the degradation behavior of wind turbine generators, in which the components’ failure is represented by a proportional hazards model, the random fluctuation of the state is simulated by the Brownian motion, and the SDE model is solved by a function transformation method. Based on the model, the characteristics of TBM and CBM, and the asymptotic relationship between them, are discussed and analyzed, the necessity and feasibility of their combination are expounded, and a joint maintenance strategy is proposed and analyzed. The results show that the stochastic model can better reflect the real deterioration state of the generator. Moreover, TBM has a fixed maintenance interval, depending on global sample tracks and, only depending on the local sample track, CBM can follow the component state. Finally, the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed model and results are verified by a practical example.