Non-Destructive Testing and Condition Monitoring Techniques for Renewable Energy Industrial Assets

Mayorkinos Papaelias, Fausto Pedro Garcia Marquez, Alexander Karyotakis

• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780081010945
• eBook ISBN:
  9780128097472
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Non-Destructive Testing and Condition Monitoring Techniques for Renewable Energy Industrial Assets integrates state-of-the-art information and discusses future developments and their significance to the improvement of the renewable energy industry. Renewable energy assets are complex systems with several critical components that require inspection and adequate maintenance in order to ensure their high availability and uninterrupted operation. This is the first book to apply NDT and condition monitoring to these complex systems. - Covers inspection and condition monitoring for a broad range of renewable energy systems, including wind turbines, wave energy devices, CSP and photovoltaic plants, and biofuel/biomass power plants - Includes a review of common types of NDT techniques - Discusses future developments in NDT and condition monitoring for renewable energy systems

Chapter 1

Wind turbines: A general reliability analysis

Fausto Pedro García Márquez^a; Jesús María Pinar Pérez^{b a} Ingenium Research Group, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain
^b CUNEF-Ingenium, University College of Financial Studies, Madrid, Spain

Abstract

The number of wind turbines and their complexity have both increased in recent years. Maintaining a high level of reliability for wind turbines as systems has become gradually significantly more challenging. At the same time, maintenance costs have risen due to the size and complexity of wind turbines even at subcomponent level. The most important faults in wind turbines are those that result in the highest downtime and loss of productivity. There are some studies that have considered specific faults affecting wind turbine operation. However, they depend on the wind turbine model considered, the geographic and environmental changes, etc. This chapter presents a research overview of the main faults commonly affecting industrial wind turbines based on the state of the art together with a systematic analysis. A fault tree has been developed to synthesise all faults of interest and evaluate qualitatively the condition of the wind turbine system. The fault tree has been studied quantitatively via binary decision diagrams. The approach presented in this chapter is a useful study to be implemented in any condition monitoring system in order to support the maintenance management of wind turbines.

Keywords

Fault tree analysis; Binary diagram decisions; Wind turbines; Condition monitoring systems

Acknowledgements

The work reported herewith has been financially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, under Research Grants DPI2015-67264-P.

1 Introduction

Wind energy has been growing steadily over the recent years. Forecasting studies confirm that it will continue to increase at least until 2030 [1]. Wind farms require an acceptable level of reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) of wind turbines in order to guarantee power generation levels that would contribute to the energy mix [2, 3]. Early detection of incipient faults prevents major component failures, and allows efficient condition-based maintenance (CBM) and repair strategies to be implemented [4].

Vachon [5] shows that the operations and maintenance (OM) costs can be 75%–90% of the investment costs, based on a 20-year life cycle for a 100-MW wind farm with 600 turbines of 750 kW each, i.e. 25%–30% of the lifetime energy generation costs [6]. The cost per failure is increasing although larger turbines may reduce the OM cost per unit power [7]. By employing an effective maintenance technique, faults can be detected while components are still operational. Consequently, appropriate actions can be planned on time to prevent damage or failure of components. This would significantly reduce the maintenance costs, operational costs, and the downtime of wind turbines [8, 9]. An effective maintenance management strategy should profit in the following wa...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Introduction to non-destructive testing and condition monitoring techniques for renewable energy industrial assets
• Chapter 1: Wind turbines: A general reliability analysis
• Chapter 2: Wind turbine inspection and condition monitoring
• Chapter 3: An overview of wind turbine maintenance management
• Chapter 4: Non-destructive testing for the evaluation of icing blades in wind turbines
• Chapter 5: Wind turbine gearboxes: Failures, surface treatments and condition monitoring
• Chapter 6: Non-destructive testing of wind turbines using ultrasonic waves
• Chapter 7: A review on condition monitoring system for solar plants based on thermography
• Chapter 8: Remotely operated vehicle applications
• Chapter 9: Remote condition monitoring for photovoltaic systems
• Chapter 10: Tidal turbines
• Chapter 11: Automatic statistical analysis of acoustic emission data sets
• Chapter 12: Non-destructive methods for detection and localisation of partial discharges
• Index