Condition based maintenance optimization for wind power generation systems under continuous monitoring

Zhigang Tian, Tongdan Jin, Bairong Wu and Fangfang Ding

Renewable Energy, 2011, vol. 36, issue 5, 1502-1509

Abstract: By utilizing condition monitoring information collected from wind turbine components, condition based maintenance (CBM) strategy 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, that is, maintenance decisions are made on individual components, rather than the whole system. However, a wind farm generally 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 replace multiple components which show relatively high risks. In this paper, we develop an optimal CBM solution to the above-mentioned issues. The proposed maintenance policy is defined by two failure probability threshold values at the wind turbine level. Based on the condition monitoring and prognostics information, the failure probability values at the component and the turbine levels can be calculated, and the optimal CBM decisions can be made accordingly. A simulation method is developed to evaluate the cost of the CBM policy. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed CBM approach. A comparative study based on commonly used constant-interval maintenance policy demonstrates the advantage of the proposed CBM approach in reducing the maintenance cost.

Keywords: Condition based maintenance; Wind turbine; Optimization; Simulation; Preventive maintenance; Artificial neural network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (80)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148110004994
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:36:y:2011:i:5:p:1502-1509

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2010.10.028

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().