Monitoring based assessment of Offshore Wind Energy Converters

Megawatt class wind energy converters in the offshore environment represent a great technical challenge concerning the design, construction and operation. It is planned to build large scale wind farms with a great number of identical structures. Inspection, maintenance and repair actions contribute largely to operation costs. Therefore monitoring and maintenance planning is essential for cost efficiency in order to keep wind energy production competitive.
With this background the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) initiated the research project IMO-WIND for the development of a monitoring and assessment system for sophisticated inspection, maintenance and repair planning.
For the online assessment of OWECs classical and structural reliability methods as well as Bayesian networks are integrally applied. The focus will be the development of monitoring based condition indicators, stochastic modelling of monitoring data for inclusion in reliability analysis aiming at condition information and decision support for inspection and maintenance planning.

• Monitoring based assessment of Offshore Wind Energy Converters (ETH Research Database 18979)