Quantifying the Impact of Wind Speed on Wind Turbine Component Failure Rates

摘要

This paper aims to model the impact of the wind speed on wind turbine failure rates. This is achieved using reliability data comprising of two modern, large scale wind farm sites consisting of approximately 380 wind turbine years of data. Weather data comes from two onsite met masts. A model is developed, using the reliability data, which calculates wind speed dependant failure rates which are used to populate a Markov Chain. Monte Carlo simulation is then exercised to simulate the lifetime of a large scale wind farm which is subjected to controlled wind speed conditions. The model then calculates wind farm unavailability due to corrective maintenance and component failure rates caused by the wind speed. Results show that offshore daily average wind speed will have a big impact on component reliability, increasing the wind turbine failure rate by approximately 86%. The components affected most by this are the control system and the yaw system. In general, the probability of a wind turbine component failure increases at higher wind speeds. Future research will make economic assessments of sites based on the wind resource and the probability of component failure based on the failure rate model.