A Condition Based Opportunistic Maintenance Strategy For Wind Turbine

Wind turbine is a multi-body and multi-domain system which constitutes hydraulic system, electrical system, control system, power electronics system and many mechanical components, such as blades, hub, gearbox, bearings, axles and etc. Wind turbine is generally installed in harsh environment like remote area and some even on the sea. The critical components of wind turbine are always operated at an altitude of nearly hundred meters. And the weather and wind speed have an huge impact on the operation of them. The complexity of the structure and the uniqueness of the running environment cause frequent failures and frequent maintenance which lead to high maintenance cost and low service hours. So, it is necessary to make appropriate maintenance strategy to rise the economy and availability for the operation of wind farmIn this paper, we proposed an new condition based opportunistic maintenance strategy which combines the advantages of opportunistic maintenance and condition based maintenance. This strategy is described as follows: we group and coordinate the maintenance of two or more components which under different condition by utilizing the concept of opportunity. Then implement maintenance on the components that cross the condition based maintenance threshold function and the components that cross the opportunistic maintenance threshold function. it can rise the economy and availability for the operation of wind farmWe mainly did the following work in this paper. Firstly, we conduct condition based maintenance for each key component by building Weibull proportional hazards model whose parameters can be estimated by a new presented approach. and we also give the definitions of condition supervisor and condition based maintenance threshold function. secondly, we propose condition based opportunistic maintenance model and carry on a detailed description for the principle of the model. At the same time, we make the definition of opportunistic maintenance threshold function. Thirdly, we calculate the two threshold functions respectively from the perspective of economy and availability and perform analysis. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of this strategy in rising the economy and availability for the operation of wind farm through the example simulation.