What Happens When Wind Farms Get Old?
Wind farms play a major role in the shift away from fossil fuels, but if older turbines fail too often or cost too much to repair, that can slow down this shift.
During the service period, it is inevitable that the reliability and performance of the turbine will degrade over time due to ageing effect. Such degradation will more or less reduce the performance of the turbine. However, it is still not a fault because it does not affect delivering the normal function of any wind turbine component.
To assess the ageing led degradation of wind turbine tower and other support structures of wind turbines, the following criterion is developed, i.e. (15) where is the benchmark value of nacelle vibration obtained when the wind turbine is normally operating at its young age, is the KDE result of the series of data .
To assess the performance degradation of the wind turbine blade and generator, the following criterion is developed, i.e. (13) where is the benchmark value of the power coefficient obtained when the wind turbine is at its young age, is the power coefficient that the wind turbine exhibits at present.
This makes it difficult to draw a reliable ageing assessment conclusion. To overcome this issue, the comprehensive ageing assessment criterion is calculated as well. The result is equal to 1.085, which is a reasonable value to indicate the slight ageing problem of the wind turbine happening within one-year time.
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