Wind & Renewable Energy

Biography

Biography: Yashwant Sinha

Abstract

The installed capacity of Offshore Wind Turbines (OWT) in Europe is likely to be 150GW by 2030. Maintenance of these OWT will incur £14billion/yr in 2030 if currently used maintenance stretegies remain unchanged. There is a need to shift from random to a novel maintenance scheme that is optimised for all types of wind farms. This will also require support of software tools and systems to collect, analyse and interpret data associated with thousands of components in OWT. In this work design of a software tool that can automate planning and management of OWT maintenance and control costs is presented. The tool is designed using a modified framework of Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA). This framework enables storage of component level failures for over 10,000 components and analysis of their potential root causes. The framework also enables estimation of the consequences of a failure based on 7 different parameters so that maintenance can be prioritised. In its present form the tool is able to correlate failures to their root causes and hence predict failure under different conditions. The database of the tool includes over 800 relationships between failures and their root causes for gearboxes and generators. This can be scaled for other components in an operational OWT and plan for predicted failures. The tool also contains other modules including recommending step by step maintenance strategy related to specific failures. A database of these maintenance strategies will reduce human errors during maintenance. Another modules of the tool are being developed to create an enterprise resource planning software package for wind turbines which will automate wind farm data management and cost effectively plan their maintenance. This will be enhancing the use of SCADA system data to detect failures and consequently plan maintenance.