Optimization Maintenance Of Wind Turbines Based On Markov Model

Many states have been seeking for new energy sources due to oil crisis and global ecological evironment concerns. As a pollution free and effective renewable source, wind power has been getting widly attention all over the world since 1970s, and developing fastly during the last three decades. Wind farm projects make the wind power be a truely alternativable energy and exert its utility.There is abundant wind energy resources around our country, particularly along the southeast coast, northeast and northwest, it can add up to a total of about 250 million kW. In recent years, the wind power technology has made rapid development, which accelerates the development of wind power industry.While the wind power industy is rapidly developing, how to ensure safety and reduce maintenance costs has become a focus in countries. A sound maintenance planning is of crucial importance for wind power systems to save the O&M cost, and optimizing maintenance decisions will determine the most cost-effective maintenance planning.This paper presents a approach using semi-Markov processes to find the optimization inspection rate to maximize the equipment availability and using semi-Markov decision processes to determine the best maintenance policy maximize the cost-effective. And then implement the approach to wind turbine maintenance policy determine. The results of how different inspection rates and maintenance policies impact equipment availability and maintenance cost are also disccussed. In addition, this paper presents how to minimize maintenance cost, and maximize the benefit under target availability. We demonstrate the presented approach using MATLAB software, and the results imply that the approach is working and practicable to determine the optimal maintenance on other equipments.