An Optimization Model to Develop Efficient Dismantling Networks for Wind Turbines

摘要

1 Introduction and Research Background Today, the dismantling of onshore wind turbines is generally conducted completely on-site. The rotor blades are cracked, the tower segments are separated, and the nacelle is cutted into smaller pieces. This undistributed dismantling of wind turbines is very time-consuming, inefficient, and implies ecological and economic risks. The dismantling of a single wind turbine takes around two weeks and entails costs of more than €130,000 [1]. The entire dismantling infrastructure needs to be transported to the wind farm and thus its operating capacity is not fully utilized. Further, in case of a repowering project, the time-consuming undistributed dismantling substantially delays the construction of new wind turbines and leads to lost revenues. An option to the undistributed dismantling is the transportation of only partly dismantled wind turbines to specialized dismantling sites for further handling. These specialized sites permit a better refining and thus higher revenues from selling the raw materials. Further, the specific costs for the necessary dismantling steps can be significantly reduced due to the specialization in the dismantling sites. However, this distributed dismantling implies higher costs for the complex transportation of large-scale components and the initialization of dismantling sites. Consequently, when planning a distributed dismantling of wind turbines, assigned companies face the challenge of determining the optimal dismantling depth for each component as well as the optimal location of specialized dismantling sites.