A novel approach to address reliability concerns of wind turbines

Designing and manufacturing a system in the current industrial world cannot be accomplished without addressing safety related issues. For this purpose, system reliability is a powerful tool to ensure that failure probability of the system is below an accepted level while the system is operational. A commonly used approach to deal with these considerations is to define a performance function for the system in order to investigate its reliability. In this case, renewable energy systems (RESs) are not different. When a wind turbine, as a RES, is designed, its reliability cannot be ignored or underestimated. Therefore, stable and efficient models are needed to make sure that the turbine remains operational and is able to safely generate electricity power. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to set up a reliability analysis model for the wind turbines. The introduced model takes two important factors, i.e. the wind speed and the wind angle, and their probability distributions into account. These two factors are indeed considered as random variables to design a new system performance function and set up the new model in order to investigate wind turbine's reliability.