The key factors are shown to be the training of staff, the availability of appropriate access infrastructure and the presentation of appropriate data from the wind farms to those staff to allow that costly. Proceedings of ar2ts conference, loughborough, 2007. Pdf assessing offshore wind turbine reliability and. An availability simulation is performed to compare the performance of the two service strategies. This depends primarily on high system reliability and adequate maintenance capability, with both being achieved within economic constraints on capital and operational costs. Additionally, with increasing size of wind turbine blades, both onshore and offshore, the serviceability and maintainability of the equipment poses its own unique challenge. Sand20080983 unlimited release printed february 2008. Technical availability technical availability a tech is a variation of the timebased availability section2. It facilitates the management of power generation, monitors the status of wind turbine.
In this paper, we propose an approach of joint redundancy and maintenance strategy optimization for offshore wind power converters, aiming to simultaneously determine the optimal allocation of redundant converters and the optimal threshold number of converters that are allowed to fail before sending a maintenance crew to the offshore platform. Review of design concepts, methods and considerations of. Thus, operation and maintenance is more challenging and costly and represents a considerable share of the cost of energy. These calculations consider only downtime that is attributable to the reliability of the turbine itself.
Overview brief update on uk offshore wind power what we know about wind turbine availability and reliability, onshore. With a proper service organisation and by ensuring that regular maintenance actions are quick and can be performed in time the operators of modern wind turbines show actual availability levels of 98% or sometimes even beyond 2. The offshore environment limits the accessibility to the wind turbines and subjects them to faster degradation processes than in onshore. Maintenance of offshore wind farms located far from the.
Reliability, availability and maintenance the development of offshore wind power has become a pressing modern energy. State of the art and technology trends for offshore wind. Offshore wind turbines operate in a harsher environment than those onshore. The availability of a wind farm, defined as the percentage of time it is able to produce electricity, is a function of the reliability, maintainability and serviceability of the hard and software used in the whole system 2. General descriptions on reliability assessment of wind turbines concentrating mostly on the structural components and application of structural reliability methods can be found in e.
With rapid development of wind farms, many challenges have emerged with respect to the reliability and availability of the inservice equipment. In the present paper, the proven concept of reliabilitycentred maintenance rcm is applied to wind turbines. Wind turbine technology for offshore locations availability, reliability and access. Analysis of field failure data collected from various wind farm databases indicates that the power converters are among the most critical components in offshore wind turbines, since they suffer from a high failure rate. The future will be even brighter with further reductions in capital and operation and maintenance costs, which can be accomplished with improved turbine reliability, especially when turbines are installed offshore. Their availability, reliability and the efficacy and costeffectiveness of the maintenance needed to achieve that availability, are essential to improve offshore wind lifecycle costs and the future of this emerging industry. Furthermore, access to offshore wind turbines is much more difficult. Offshore wind turbine reliability durham university.
It is also a critical field to examine, as wind power experiences a high cost pressure, and the cost of service will raise as service moves further from shore. In section ii, the relevance of rcm in the context of databased maintenance management and the implemented analysis procedure are. Reliability, availability, maintainability ram for wind. Nonetheless, a future offshore wind farm consisting of 200 turbines of 5 mw each will therefore need some 3000 offshore visits per year. The availability of wind turbines and wind farms will determine the energy impact they are able to. Availability of offshore wind farms wind turbine or wind farm availability is a timebased ratio of the amount of time a wind turbinefarm is ready to operate in a given time period divided by the total time. Operation and maintenance of offshore wind turbines are more difficult. Not only the installation is more difficult and more expensive but also building wind turbines offshore has a major.
This is heightening the need for accurate reliability predictions so that wind turbine availability and life can be predicted and reason. Optimal redundancy and maintenance strategy decisions for. Reliability, availability and maintenance aspects of large. Riskbased operation and maintenance planning for o. Availability, operation and maintenance costs of offshore. Offshore wind turbines an overview sciencedirect topics. Their availability, reliability and the efficacy and costeffectiveness of the maintenance, needed to achieve that availability, are essential to improve offshore wind lifecycle costs and the future of this emerging industry. Operation and maintenance costs of offshore wind farms and.
The dowec projects aims at implementation of large wind turbines in large scale wind farms. Introduction to wind turbines and their reliability. Reliabilitygrowth analysis of wind turbines from field data. Reliability, availability and maintenance the development of offshore wind power has become a pressing modern energy issue in which the uk is taking a major. Modelling and simulation of the operation and maintenance. This depends upon the longevity of the wind turbines which make up offshore wind farms. High availability is crucial for the economics of any wind farm. Proceedinggf fs of iee pemd conference,,p dublin, april 2006. A model is presented to optimize the inspection interval for the blade. In situations where both limited access and limited availability of maintenance equipment are at stake. The global wind industry has witnessed exciting developments in recent years. Windinlimits availability number of hours generating kw iv number of hours that the wind is between cutin and cutout3. A parametric whole life cost model for offshore wind farms. These models offer strong reliability and availability, ease of maintenance and.
The economical benefits of condition based maintenance strategies are evaluated for drive train and for blades of wind turbines. P j tavner, g j w van bussel, f spinato, machine and converter reliabilities in wts. Reliability centered maintenance studies rcm codification systemising technical hierarchy for maintenance and spare parts. Rams engineering in the development of offshore wind. There is potential for more wind turbines to be erected in remote and offshore locations, to achieve a greater wind energy harvest, where the access to turbines for maintenance will be restricted. On maintenance optimization for offshore wind farms. Given this large base of installed wind turbines, nrel is increasingly researching ways to increase wind turbine reliability, with the goal of minimizing maintenance costs, improving capacity factors, and ultimately driving down the. This thesis reports on investigations undertaken into the reliability, availability and maintenance of offshore wind farms when considering different maintenance strategies, an understanding of which is fundamental when considering the technical and economical viability of existing and future offshore wind farms. Renewable energy series offshore wind turbines reliability, availability and maintenance this book intends to address these issues headon and demonstrate clearly to manufacturers, developers and operators the facts and figures of wind turbine operation and maintenance in the inclement offshore environment, recommending how maintenance should be done to achieve. Any repair is subject to weather and sea conditions, and in winter it may take weeks to access an offshore wind turbine tong, 2010. Typically, the communications link is a relatively.
Offshore availability reduces with wind speed 17 supergen wind training. This thesis proposes decision models for cost efficient maintenance for offshore wind power systems. One efficient approach to enhance the reliability and availability of the wind power systems is through using a redundant converter design, in which a set of power. Depending on the purpose of the availability definition, turbine availability may include faults, maintenance, delayed maintenance due to impeded access, lightning, and cable unwrapping.
Keysan, in electrical drives for direct drive renewable energy systems, 20. This chapter has presented the personnel, infrastructure and data issues associated with improving the maintenance, availability and reliability of offshore wind farms. In contrast, a wil form of calculation only considers the availability during times when the wind and temperature are within the turbines operating limits, and the grid and bop are available. Report on wind turbine subsystem reliability a survey of. The paper uses an approach in which the design process of an owt is divided into three steps. Wind turbine gearbox reliability database, condition. Definitions of availability terms for the wind industry. Indirectly, the acceptance of windgenerated power by the financial and developer communities as a viable enterprise is influenced by the risk associated with the capital equipment reliability. Reliability, availability and maintenance aspects of largescale offshore wind farms.
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