Turbine tool aims to cut costs

Researchers at Robert Gordon University (RGU) are developing a software tool which aims to dramatically cut maintenance costs for offshore wind turbines.

The challenging and rough offshore conditions in the North Sea causes damage to the condition of turbines increasing the maintenance costs for offshore wind farms over their lifetime.

The RGU team is trying to develop a tool that allows companies to carry out turbine maintenance efficiently.

The aim is to be able to input information generated by an offshore wind farm into the tool so it automatically generates an optimum maintenance programme and develops a sparesholding inventory tailored specifically to the turbines operating at those wind farms.

The benefits include reducing the direct costs of maintaining the offshore wind farm, maximising their availability and reliability to keep costs down over the turbines life cycle.

RGU PhD student Yashwant Sinha said: “Currently, many of the maintenance regimes for wind farms are quite random, and we want to try and develop a system that will predict the failure of components and allow companies to carry out pre-planned action to lower the costs of maintenance.

“For this, we are developing a software tool that can assist in the timings of failures and the parts that would be needed.

“A downside for delayed or no maintenance is the financial loss that is linked with downtime of offshore wind turbines, which can be as high as £170/MWh – that is equal to £142,800 for a 5MW wind turbine which is down for one week.

“At present the cost of offshore wind turbine maintenance is as high as 35% of the total lifetime costs which equates to £14bn a year for the 150GW of offshore wind turbines which are predicted to be installed in Europe by 2030.”

RGU engineering professor John Steel added: “Maintenance of wind turbines is costly and schemes designed to evaluate its failures will be an important step, not only towards improving reliability but also enabling companies to plan for a maintenance programme based on data from that particular wind farm.”

 Image: (Morguefile)