ABSTRACT
Wind energy has become an attractive source of renewable energy, and its installed capacity worldwide has grown significantly in recent years. Despite this, unexpected failures, loss of production, high operation and maintenance costs, and downtime associated with the failures are major problems in any wind farm. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) has been extensively used by wind turbine assembly manufacturers for analyzing, evaluating and prioritizing the potential failure modes. However, several problems are associated with its practical implementation in wind farms: (i) the obtained value of RPN for a wind turbine system is not self-informative for wind farm managers, (ii) there are variety of wind turbine types with different structures, and hence, it is not possible to compare a wind turbine’s RPN with other wind turbines’ RPN for prioritization purposes, and (iii) important economical aspects (such as production loss and logistics) are ignored in the RPN value. In order to overcome these problems, we develop a new tool for risk and failure mode analysis in wind turbine systems by integrating the aspects of the traditional FMEA and economic consideration. Then, a quantitative study is carried out on sixteen sub-assemblies of an offshore wind turbine system, and the results are compared with its onshore counterpart. The results show that the both offshore and onshore wind turbine systems face many of the same risks, but there are some main differences worth considering.
