Maintenance of wind turbine systems under continuous monitoring

Abstract

By utilizing condition monitoring information collected from wind turbine components, condition based maintenance (CBM) can be used to reduce the operation and maintenance costs of wind power generation systems. The existing CBM methods for wind power generation systems deal with wind turbine components separately. In other words, maintenance decisions are made on individual components, rather than the whole system. However, a wind farm consists of multiple wind turbines, and each wind turbine has multiple components including main bearing, gearbox, generator, etc. There are economic dependencies among wind turbines and their components. That is, once a maintenance team is sent to the wind farm, it may be more economical to take the opportunity to maintain multiple turbines, and when a turbine is stopped for maintenance, it may be more cost-effective to simultaneously maintain multiple components which show relatively high risks. In this paper, we develop an optimal CBM solution to address the above-mentioned issues. A simulation method is developed to evaluate the cost of the CBM policy. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed CBM approach.