Economic viability analysis for icing blades detection in wind turbines

摘要

Reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) of wind turbines in cold climates are closely related to ice accretion. The deterioration of RAMS of the wind turbines involves costs such as Operation and Maintenance costs and energy losses. Systems to monitor the condition of the wind turbines play a key role in the wind energy industry to decrease the costs mentioned above and to improve the maintenance management. This research presents an economic study of the life cycle cost (LCC) for ice condition monitoring systems in wind turbines. In particular, the paper studies the economic feasibility of different commercial ice detection systems through a LCC model when wind turbines are exposed to different scenarios. To date, the scientific literature does not collect any study about the LCC for ice detection systems using different annual rates of return, and providing a map with numerical solution. The study is extended by including a bank loan for a real point of view. The findings of this study reveal the ice detection systems that are more profitable and the selection criteria to decide the use of a bank loan. Finally, it is shown that predictive costs are much smaller than corrective cost reaching a reduction of these corrective costs with the ice detection systems. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.