Sales Specialist, Aqtech

Biography

With the major growth of wind turbine farms from the last decades, operation and maintenance (O&M) teams have been facing increasing challenges to keep them running. One of the major components of concern regarding the generating asset’s condition are it’s blade bearings, since they connect the blades to the hub and, in case of failure, their consequential damage may be catastrophic. To avoid these types of failure, asset owners typically have two options: monitor manually and periodically the blade bearing gaps, or permanently monitor these components via a remotely controlled condition monitoring system (CMS), which, for this study, consists in proximeters, accelerometers and current sensors, to monitor any blade bearing anomaly such as excessive clearance and wear. This paper’s main goal is to compare both approaches through a case study, concerning a 200 wind turbines farm, in a typical reality of the northeast of Brazil. A Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) approach was performed. The reliability of the assets, combining Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time For Repair (MTFR) as well as Risk Assessment of catastrophic failure for the first scenario were also used as a compliment to the analysis. The main findings of this study concern many benefits to the wind farm’s owner in installing a CMS for the blade bearings, from greater reliability due to a smaller MTFR, to boosted availability due to a smaller number of inspections of each turbine. This case study estimates payback for the installation of the systems between one and three years, depending on how critical the scenarios avoided by their presence is.