Abstract
Out of the total wind turbine failure events, blade damage accounts for a substantial part, with some studies estimating it at around 23%. Current operation and maintenance (O&M) practices typically make use of corrective type maintenance as the basic approach, implying high costs for repair and replacement activities as well as large revenue losses, mainly in the case of offshore wind farms. The recent development and evolution of condition monitoring techniques, as well as the fact that an increasing number of installed turbines are equipped with online monitoring systems, offers a large amount of information on the blades structural health to the decision maker. Further, inspections of the blades are often performed in connection with service. In light of the obtained information, a preventive type of maintenance becomes feasible, with the potential of predicting the blades remaining life to support O&M decisions for avoiding major failure events. The present paper presents a fracture mechanics based model for estimating the remaining life of a wind turbine blade, focusing on the crack propagation in the blades adhesive joints. A generic crack propagation model is built in Matlab based on a Paris law approach. The model is used within a risk-based maintenance decision framework to optimize maintenance planning for the blades lifetime.
Highlights
Operation and maintenance (O&M) activities have been shown to contribute to around 25%–30% of the total energy cost from offshore wind power [1], leading to an increased effort for optimizing maintenance plans
Modern wind farms are installed with condition monitoring (CM) systems that offer a continuous influx of information on various behavioral and environmental parameters
This paper presents a lifetime analysis of an offshore wind turbine using a physical degradation model based on wind measurements for preventive maintenance, and focuses on analyzing the effect of different decision parameters on the total expected O&M cost
Summary
Operation and maintenance (O&M) activities have been shown to contribute to around 25%–30% of the total energy cost from offshore wind power [1], leading to an increased effort for optimizing maintenance plans. This is not a trivial task, due to the multitude of elements present in a turbine system, along with the limited understanding of their behavior, interactions and degradation and failure mechanisms. This paper presents a lifetime analysis of an offshore wind turbine using a physical degradation model based on wind measurements for preventive maintenance, and focuses on analyzing the effect of different decision parameters on the total expected O&M cost. The model is built for analyzing a single component, namely the rotor blade, as it was noted that this element has a relatively large failure frequency compared to other elements, covering around 25% of the total number of turbine breakdowns [2]
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