Wind Energy

Measuring Wind Turbines Reliability – Results of the Reliawind Project

Over the last three years, the EU funded Reliawind Project has been conducting research to improve the reliability of wind turbines. In his presentation at European Wind Energy Association 2011 in Brussels, Michael Wilkinson, GL Garrad Hassan, gives insights to the results of the Reliawind Project. The presentation will be held on Wednesday, 16.03.2010, from 9:00 – 10:30 at EWEA.

One of the reasons for this wind power project was to better understand reliability by measuring the failure rate and downtime of existing wind turbines at operational wind farm plants. Reliability is of interest to wind turbine manufacturers and owners, and the project has included data provided by both.

The objective has been to accurately measure reliability using all the data available from modern wind turbines. These data sources include 10-minute average SCADA, automated fault and alarm logs, work orders, service reports and O&M contractor reports. These sources are often not connected and have usually not been collected in such a way as to allow the easy interpretation for reliability measurement.

The primary strategy of the Reliawind work has been to develop common standards and rigorous, structured methods. To classify the components of different manufacturers’ turbines in a generic fashion, a turbine taxonomy has been developed. This describes the turbine in terms its of Systems, Sub-Systems, Assemblies, Sub-Assemblies and Components. The discrete data sources have been connected and processed into a common database format to allow all downtime events to be identified and tagged according to the standard taxonomy. The result is a large dataset comprising an exhaustive list of downtime events.

The reliability has been measured by the derivation of Reliability Profiles, which illustrate how the failure rate and downtime is divided between the different taxonomic items.

The Reliawind project is now concluding and the new work presented will discuss the experience gained by the project partners and demonstrate the project’s final results. This will include a demonstration of systems and methods employed. A comparison with other public sources of reliability information will also be presented and the similarities and differences will be described. The results will include data from multiple manufacturers in different operating regimes and it will be possible to discuss the results in some detail. GL Garrad Hassan is also involved in the "Improving Wind Turbine Reliability" side event at European Wind Energy Association.

www.gl-garradhassan.com/