Effect of Seasonal Weather and Site Conditions on Wind Turbine Failures

Very little research to date has looked at how weather affects reliability of wind turbines. The only published study was by Tavner et al [1] but the authors examined only a very high level database. With access to a much richer source of maintenance and reliability data, it will be possible move beyond this previous work and begin to explore how failure modes are coupled to environmental conditions.

Aims and Objectives
• Develop a set of tools to mine a maintenance database and extract time-based failure rates
• Investigate these metrics in the context of weather patterns and site-specific conditions (such as humidity, temperature, wind speed etc.)
• Produce innovative modelling to capture dependencies
• Outputs can be used as feedback to wind farm planners or to identify remedial actions for asset operators

[1] Tavner, P.J., Edwards, C., Brinkman, A. and Spinato, F. (2006) ‘Influence of Wind Speed on Wind Turbine Reliability’, Wind Engineering, v30, n1, 2006, p55-72