Failure Rate Assessment for Onshore and Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Abstract

A detailed analysis is performed on a dataset of failure and maintenance records from various onshore wind farms located in different geographical areas for the safety, risk, reliability, availability, and maintainability characterization of wind turbines. Specifically, characteristics related to failures, including the criticality of failure modes, failure frequencies, failure rates, and lifetime distributions of components, are analyzed to support the failure identification and failure prevention of wind turbines. Additionally, characteristics of maintenance, including typical maintenance measures of failures, policies for spare components, delayed maintenance, as well as related times such as reaction time, travelling time, and mean time to repair, are provided to support the maintenance management of wind farms. Based on the operational data analysis results, a reliability influence factor-based failure data correction approach is presented to transfer the onshore data to floating offshore turbines by modeling the differences in failure occurrences based on experts’ judgment. A comprehensive comparison with existing studies validates the performance of the proposed approach.