Through-life engineering services of wind turbines

The past decade has seen exponential yearly growth in installed capacity wind energy power generation. As a result, wind farm (WF) projects have evolved from small scale isolated installations into complex utility scale power generation systems comprising of arrays of large wind turbines (WTs), which are designed to operate in harsh environments. However, this has increased the need for through-life engineering service (TES) for WTs especially in offshore applications, where the operations and maintenance (O&M) becomes more complicated as a result of the harsh marine weather and environmental conditions. In this paper, a generic methodology to benchmark TES in industries is presented and used to assess TES in the wind industry. This was done by identifying the current state-of-the-art in methods and applications, requirements and needs, challenges, and opportunities of TES in the wind sector. Furthermore an illustrative case study on WT gearbox through-life support is presented demonstrating how some of the core aspects, such as remote condition monitoring, can be used to aid the in-service support of wind turbine gearboxes.