Floating offshore wind turbine reliability analysis based on system grading and dynamic FTA

Abstract

Currently, floating offshore wind power acts as a new form of marine renewable energy, attracting much attention all over the world. Due to constraints of technology and cost, floating wind turbines are still at the stage of preliminary trials. Reliability analysis on floating wind turbines is essential and urgent for solving the issues caused by high cost and challenges in searching failure causes. Primarily, this research proposes the scientific, systematic grading of floating wind power equipment system based upon its structure and function, providing with explicit internal relation of system and the precondition of failure modes analysis. Dynamic fault tree analysis on floating wind turbines is conducted to discuss sequentially dependent failures and redundancy failures. Furthermore, failure rates of relevant offshore structures are searched according to previous studies, databases and reports. Different modules of floating wind turbines take respective proper failure cases for references. The overall reliability results of floating wind turbines has been achieved. The research contributes to designing, construction and maintenance of floating wind turbines to control investment and enlarge economic benefits.