The wind turbine reliability is a crucial factor for
the successful operation of a wind power plant, affecting its
availability and efficiency. Operation and maintenance costs
affect the performance of the whole system and reinforce the
necessity of redesign of specific sub-assemblies achieving lower
energy production costs.
At the first stage, field data make up Weibull sets in order to
form the appropriate distribution-curve of the failure rate in
each corresponding top event, are presented. These sets are
limited to sub-systems having not only adequate data of the
corresponding top events, producing more realistic results, but
also having great risk priority, according to FMEA approach.
These Weibull sets are linked with the corresponding top event of
each subsystem and used to quantify the failure rates.
The validation of previous studies made on wind turbine
reliability FMEA analysis through the FTA method is
investigated in this paper, as well as the results from previous
studies made on reliability of wind turbines using the FMEA
method. Though, the reliability and importance results as
derived from a quantitative analysis, seem to be following the
same trend like previous studies from different and various
approaches. As a result, Electrical and Control systems as far as
the Hydraulic System need to be re-designed with better
performance and reliability since they are crucial for the
operation of each WT separately as well as for the whole wind
farm.
