Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Serviceability (RAMS) for offshore wind turbine

OFFSHORE operational conditions differ from onshore especially because of their exposure to extreme weather conditions, remote locations, and difficult to impossible accessibility in certain periods of the year.  Consequently, the availability levels for offshore wind turbines become near to unacceptable, and the need of research to improve reliability becomes evident.

The general objective of this research is to create a design methodology to increase reliability and availability for offshore wind farms, without sacrificing economy and complexity.  The intended approach is to develop an intelligent maintenance system capable of responding to faults by reconfiguring the system and/or subsystems. 

Tools from Control Theory, Condition Monitoring (CM), maintenance strategies, and knowledge on offshore specific conditions together with qualitative physics theory and other design tools will be used to deal with failure modes, in a less conventional way.

Within the system, there are different levels at which this reconfiguration concept can be applied.  The aim is to make use of the existing functional redundancies to keep the wind turbine operational, even at a reduced capacity if necessary.  The possible solutions can range from using information from adjacent wind turbines to setting up different operational modes.

The end result will be a design methodology to deal with faults by providing alternative configurations for the operation of the wind turbine.  This will be reflected in having a decreased stoppage rate, reduced number of failure events, maintained energy output possibly at reduced rate until the next scheduled maintenance, and reduced maintenance visits.

Contact information

Erika Echavarria
email: E.EchavarriaUribe (add @tudelft.nl manually) 

Supervisors

Prof. Tetsuo Tomiyama
Dr. Gerard van Bussel