Joint venture Project for Increasing the Availability of Wind Power Plants (EVW)
IZP is leading the joint vebture project “Increasing the availability of Wind Power Plants" which is funded by the federal (German) Ministry of Environmental Affairs (BMU). In this project the special offshore conditions are taken into consideration - see also www.evw-wind.de. Co-operation partners within the project are:
- A. Friedrich Flender AG (Herne),
- ENERTRAG AG (Dauerthal),
- Institut für Solare Energieversorgungstechnik, ISET e.V. (Kassel) and
- SAG Erwin Peters GmbH (Hamburg).
Goals of the Project
The project is planned to cover a period of three years and will consist of the following tasks:
- Analysis of exixting plants, operational and usage options
- Information logistics, system structuring and analysis pf process
- System concept and realisation
- Pilot running and interfaces
- Basics for operational implementation
The focus of our company within the project will be the task "Knowlegde management and maintenance optimisation as methodical base for increasing the availability of wind power plants".
Current status of sub-project of IZP
For getting started on the system structuring and analysis an FMEA was chosen and completed. Generally this procedure serves to identify and evaluate possible faults. In this case however the FMEA procedure was applied to examine how the system of an existing wind power plant are interconnected. The aim was furthermore to systematically lern about the problems of such plants. It isn´t known whether similar datailed examinations have been carried out by manufacturers of wind mills.
The examination object was a relatively common plant in the 1,5 MW class. Für die Systemstrukturierung
The international
The individual power mill types vary greatly. Therfore it was´nt possible to complete an FMEA which is iniversally valid. We plan to derive
FMEAs for other types at a later stage.
A separate assessment catalogue has been set up for the assessment of fault significance, probability of occurence and detection. The experiences from maintenance were essential for this catalogue.
A total of 300 fault combinations were considered within a pareto analysis of the completed evaluation. The following were identified as being highly critical:
- Electrical defects in the converter cabinet,
- Imbalance in the rotor blades due the water inflow and
- Memory error with electricity disconnection which might lead to an initialisation error and incorrect positioning of the rotor blades.
The potential risks that were identified will be the main area of discussion in the following project tasks, especially in regards of data analysis. It will have to be verified if the expert opinions are reflected in the practical data.
Open tasks:
An analysis of the operations and maintenance data will help to show more clearly the identified fault cases on the existing plants. It will then be possible to derive life cycle information for the individual components, which again will be the baseline for optimising the maintenance.
For the data analyses the data files of the participating project partners will be consulted. The aim will be to gather reliabilty parameters for all components in accordance with the RDS-PP structuring and put them together into a parameter library. In this regard it will be necessary to adjust all avaible databases to the RDS-PP. A comparison of data from different sources will only be possible that way.
Furthermore it will be indispensable to define an appropriate lifetime measure. In that case it still has to be decided, if days of operation, load hours or a combination therof will be used.