Grouping Maintenance Policy for Improving Reliability of Wind Turbine Systems Considering Variable Cost

Wind farms have gained wide attention due to unlimited resources and clean energy. Considering that wind turbine systems are always in harsh conditions, subsystem failures could reduce the reliability of wind turbine systems. At present, the maintenance behaviors for wind turbine systems are various (e.g., corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance) when reliability is reduced below the threshold. Considering the maintenance cost and downtime, it is impossible to repair each component in a timely manner. One of the key problems is dividing components into maintenance groups to improve maintenance efficiency. In this paper, a grouping maintenance policy considering the variable cost (GMP-VC) is proposed to improve direct-drive permanent magnet (DPM) turbine systems. Grouping modes are proposed to fully consider the stated transition probability of turbine components and the variable cost of turbine systems. A maintenance model is formulated to select components as members of the group based on a RIM-VC index. An instance is given to verify the proposed GMP-VC method. The result indicates that the proposed maintenance policy may save maintenance costs over baseline plans.