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To make wind energy competitive with other power plants in the near future, enhancements of availability, reliability and lifetime of the turbines are required. Significant improvements in this field can be seen in efficient maintenance and repair strategies on the basis of condition monitoring systems.
Although modern wind energy converters have reached high technical standards, there is still a strong potential for further development, especially with large, Megawatt sized machines.
Autonomous on-line condition monitoring systems with integrated fault detection algorithms allow early warnings of mechanical and electrical defects to prevent major component failures. Side effects on other components can be reduced significantly.
Many faults can be detected while the defective component is still operational. Thus, necessary repair actions can be planned in time and need not be taken immediately. This is important especially for off-shore plants, where bad weather conditions (storm, high tide, ...) can prevent any repair actions for several weeks. Moreover, condition monitoring will also detect extreme external conditions, such as icing or wave-induced tower oscillations of off-shore plants, and can trigger appropriate control actions to prevent damage of plant components.
With this strategy, overall maintenance costs and down times of wind energy converters can be significantly reduced. With the influences of specific component loads taken into consideration by the condition monitoring system, maintenance intervals can be extended. |
