Reliability Research Of Floating Wind Turbine Based On FMEA And FTA

Offshore wind power generation is currently the fastest developing renewable energy technology in the world. Compared to its traditional counterpart, this technology has received wide attention owing to many advantages such as the abundance of wind energy, stable wind velocity and the capability of large scale deployment. The major equipment for offshore wind power generation is the floating wind turbine, the failure of which would cease the operation of the offshore wind farm, severely impact power generation and bring heavy economic losses. As the offshore wind power generation technology improves, floating wind turbines are becoming larger and more sophisticated, demanding higher reliability. Therefore, an effective risk evaluation on floating wind turbines is essential.This paper firstly introduced worldwide progress of the research on the reliability of floating wind turbines. What followed was a study on the structure of the turbines'components and their functions. The floating wind turbines were then classified according to the above two criteria. A diagram of floating wind turbine structure and function was drawn.As a result, a reliability model of the floating wind turbines was constructed, based on the failure logical relation between the system and its components. Subsequently, risk identification was applied to the floating wind turbines to investigate the causes and impact of failures, establish floating wind turbine FMEA, calculate RPN, and evaluate failure risk level,eventually realizing a quantitative analysis of the reliability of the floating wind turbines.Based on the logical relation between the basic events and system failure, the fault tree of the floating wind turbine system was created to perform qualitative and quantitative analysis.Finally, together with FMEA and FTA, a maintenance strategy was designed for the reliability of the floating wind turbine system. Simulations were performed on the reliability which focused on preventive maintenance period. The priority of element repairs was determined by the calculated failure severity.