Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis for Wind Turbines Considering Climatic Regions and Comparing Geared and Direct Drive Wind Turbines

Samet Ozturk, Vasilis Fthenakis and Stefan Faulstich
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Samet Ozturk: Earth and Environmental Engineering Department, Columbia University, 116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA
Vasilis Fthenakis: Earth and Environmental Engineering Department, Columbia University, 116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA
Stefan Faulstich: Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology—IEE, Königstor 59, 34119 Kassel, Germany

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 9, 1-18

Abstract: The wind industry is looking for ways to accurately predict reliability and availability of newly installed wind turbines. Failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is a technique utilized to determine the critical subsystems of wind turbines. There are several studies in the literature which have applied FMECA to wind turbines, but no studies so far have used it considering different weather conditions or climatic regions. Furthermore, different wind turbine design types have been analyzed applying FMECA either distinctively or combined, but no study so far has compared the FMECA results for geared and direct-drive wind turbines. We propose to fill these gaps by using Koppen-Geiger climatic regions and two different turbine models of direct-drive and geared-drive concepts. A case study is applied on German wind farms utilizing the Wind Measurement & Evaluation Programme (WMEP) database which contains wind turbine failure data collected between 1989 and 2008. This proposed methodology increases the accuracy of reliability and availability predictions and compares different wind turbine design types and eliminates underestimation of impacts of different weather conditions.

Keywords: reliability; FMEA; wind turbines; climatic conditions; wind turbine type (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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