Failure causes Based Wind Turbine Components Classification and Failure Propagation: For proactive maintenance implementatio

Abstract

The wind turbine is a complex system that can be divided into subsystems or several independent components with many interrelationships that characterize dependencies. The maintenance cost of these machines represents a big part of the total price of the kWh (40% for offshore wind energy). New maintenance practice such as e-maintenance or proactive maintenance need accurate degradation model to avoid costly corrective maintenance. The assessment of the reliability of wind turbines has become increasingly important in recent years. Majority of existing works in the literature deal with the reliability at a component level. However, the maintenance task aims to repair all the system, which cannot be guaranteed by the knowledge of the state of a single component without the consideration if its interactions with the rest of the system. In this paper, we propose a new classification of the component of a wind turbine that consists in grouping the various components by their causes of failure. The purpose of this classification is to improve the future design of the system and to allow the performance of proactive maintenance by eliminating the cause of failure and prevent their re-occurrence.