Posters

Abstract

Catastrophic damages on wind turbine (WT) components are common in the wind industry and the investigations performed often identify the component where the problem starts but do not address the origin of the event. The solutions may include modifying management factors, instructions, general behaviors, and other factors during the manufacturing, operational or design stage. When the lessons learned are not extrapolated to other wind turbine components or are not based on the basic causes, the catastrophic damage will likely repeat in a different component or through a different chain of events but originated from the same root cause (RC). In general lines, the investigations performed during the catastrophic damages on the wind industry are not systematically conducted and the corrective measures are not weighted to focus on the most important contributing factors. DNV experience includes a significant number of catastrophic events comprising the most common damaged wind turbine components such as gearboxes, main bearings, blades, nacelle, and towers. The experience gathered from fires, wind turbine collapses, fatalities or massive component damages has been gathered during years of projects and investigations. The key stages of an investigation have been identified and are presented to show what is the necessary level of detail that the investigator should check as a minimum to provide an acceptable level of results. Examples of catastrophic damages are also presented together with the different approaches and variables so the industry players can understand the minimum level of analysis that should be requested and how the focus of each investigation stage will change for each case. The industry will learn with practical cases how the investigator should iterate on the failure hypothesis to determine the basic causes and when these iterations can be optimized without affecting the quality of the corrective measures finally proposed for the focus event.