Operation and maintenance

A key success factor in a wind power business is the ability to optimise the efforts and resources spent on operation and maintenance vs. the power production and total lifetime. The task is a multidimensional optimization problem where the amount and type of operation and maintenance actions in relation to the profit has to be analysed in order to optimise the system availability and power production for different types of sites. Here it is especially important to understand if wind farms in Nordic conditions are operated in the best way today, and if not how to mitigate the problems. Here more comparisons between design calculations and actual operation loads play an important role. Is the technical lifetime correctly estimated? 

When it comes to maintaining turbines, conditions monitoring methods to detect, predict and prevent faults and failures in wind turbines needs to be further developed. Preventive and opportunistic maintenance combined with real-time data should be the focus of these models. Due to icing and fatigue loads (mechanical and hygro-thermal), damage tolerance of composite blades has become an increasing problem. It will become even more important as the size of blades increases.