Resumen de Life centered maintenance- a new methodology for maintenance management and planning applied to wind turbines

Rodrigo José de Andrade Vieira

• The asset and maintenance management gain attention from different perspectives in industry, including wind energy. Wind is an attractive source of renewable energy, as it can be seen by the growing number of installed wind farms all over the world, and the future trends of new installations over the coming years. The cost-effective, efficient use of available assets is crucial in the current industrial context due to the competitive framework where current businesses are being developed.

  Of increasing interest in industry is the fusion or integration of information coming from different departments of a company, such as operation and maintenance. Maximizing the lifespan of the asset is one of the measures currently being analyzed and applied in this field. Maintaining the asset when required helps to guarantee that this maximization is achieved. Moreover, new engineering systems are becoming increasingly complex and subject to more severe working conditions to reach the new operation demand and to respond to the required quality levels. The need for having systems with higher levels of quality and low costs causes the development of equipment with new technologies and new maintenance strategies.

  Many maintenance models have been proposed over a long period of time. The current practice of maintenance applied to the existing wind turbines is based on periodic or preventive maintenance actions recommended by their manufacturers. However, this typical approach does not pay attention to the real and local life of the wind turbines characterized by weather conditions at the location, stress by over-load, continuous working hours, etc. These factors are crucial to a knowledge of the specific conditions in which a wind turbine operates, and any maintenance has to be tailored to these conditions if one is to minimize costs or maximize the lifespan of the wind turbine.

  This thesis aims at providing a new and practical methodology for maintenance management and planning applied to wind turbines to support the decision making process, using an approach that is capable of integrate data from different sources in a unique maintenance plan committed to the system needs (present constrains) and wishes (future constrains). In this sense, a wide solution is proposed to the maintenance management decision-making problem, based on a new and complete maintenance methodology that covers all the main asset life management steps. The case studies presented in this thesis are focused mainly on the wind turbines, but the global concepts and methodology could be applied for any industrial asset, if SCADA data is available. In this sense, no extra data, for example from an especial condition monitoring system, is needed. However, if this kind of data is available, it can be easily integrated in the proposed maintenance management framework.