Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis for Wind Turbines Considering Climatic Regions and Comparing Geared and Direct Drive Wind Turbines

The wind industry is looking for ways to accurately predict the reliability and availability of newly installed wind turbines. Failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is a technique utilized for determining the critical subsystems of wind turbines. There are several studies which applied FMECA for wind turbines in the literature, but no studies so far have considered different weather conditions or climatic regions. Furthermore, various design types of wind turbines have been analyzed applying FMECA but no study so far has applied FMECA to compare the reliability of geared and direct-drive wind turbines. We propose to fill these gaps by using Koppen-Geiger climatic regions and two different turbine models of direct-drive and geared-drive concepts. A case study is applied on German wind farms utilizing the WMEP database which contains wind turbine failure data from 1989 to 2008. This proposed methodology increases the accuracy of reliability and availability predictions and compares different wind turbine design types and eliminates underestimation of impacts of different weather conditions.

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