Integrated Structural Dependence and Stochastic Dependence for Opportunistic Maintenance of Wind Turbines by Considering Carbon Emissions

Wind turbines have a wide range of applications as the main equipment for wind-power generation because of the rapid development of technology. It is very important to select a reasonable maintenance strategy to reduce the operation and maintenance costs of wind turbines. Traditional maintenance does not consider the environmental benefits. Thus, for the maintenance problems of wind turbines, an opportunistic maintenance strategy that considers structural correlations, random correlations, and carbon emissions is proposed. First, a Weibull distribution is used to describe the deterioration trend of wind turbine subsystems. The failure rates and reliability of wind turbines are described by the random correlations among all subsystems. Meanwhile, two improvement factors are introduced into the failure rate and carbon emission model to describe imperfect maintenance, including the working-age fallback factor and the failure rate increasing factor. Then, the total expected maintenance cost can be described as the objective function for the proposed opportunistic maintenance model, including the maintenance preparation cost, maintenance adjustment cost, shutdown loss cost, and operation cost. The maintenance preparation cost is related to the economic correlation, and the maintenance adjustment cost is described by using the maintenance probabilities under different maintenance activities. The shutdown loss cost is obtained by considering the structural correlation, and the operation cost is related to the energy consumption of wind turbines. Finally, a case study is provided to analyze the performance of the proposed model. The obtained optimal opportunistic maintenance duration can be used to interpret the structural correlation coefficient, random correlation coefficient, and sensitivity of carbon emissions. Compared with preventive maintenance, the proposed model provides better performance for the maintenance problems of wind turbines and can obtain relatively good solutions in a short computation time.

Automated summary

This study proposes an opportunistic maintenance strategy for wind turbines that considers structural correlations, random correlations, and carbon emissions. It introduces a Weibull distribution to describe the deterioration trend of wind turbine subsystems and considers failure rates and reliability through random correlations among subsystems. The study also incorporates improvement factors and various costs to describe imperfect maintenance. A case study is provided to analyze the performance of the proposed model.