Evaluating the Performance of Maintenance Strategies: A Simulation-based Approach for Wind Turbines

The performance of multi-component systems is heavily influenced by the individual maintenance strategy applied on each subsystem, its costs and the impact of subsystem fails on the performance of the whole system. For an assessment of different combinations of maintenance strategies, we present a simulation-based evaluation approach applied to an offshore wind farm, investigating the produced energy and levelized costs of electricity. The evaluation is carried out by breaking wind turbines down into major subsystems, applying different suitable maintenance strategies to them and monitoring the performance of the entire wind farm. The investigated configurations include corrective, predictive and reliability-centered maintenance strategies. Thereby we investigate limits regarding minimum and maximum performance as well as the impact of a realistic application of monitoring systems on system performance.