Effects of Power Generation on the Opportunistic Maintenance Strategy for Wind Turbines Considering Reliability

Corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance are two common maintenance strategies used in the wind farms, whose drawbacks are obvious and significant. Opportunistic maintenance strategy takes advantage of the dependencies existing among the wind turbine components and implement combined maintenance actions to reduce the huge downtime cost. The opportunistic maintenance strategy for wind turbines has made a great progress, as well as the strategy considering imperfect and condition-based maintenance. However, existing maintenance strategy researches are usually concerned with the maintenance itself and the effects of power generation are barely considered. Nowadays, a current research trend in manufacturing system is the integration of maintenance and production planning. In this paper, the effects of power generation on opportunistic maintenance strategy for wind turbines considering reliability are researched. The opportunistic maintenance reliability threshold is not constant and depends on the real-time power generation. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the economical advantages of this proposed strategy over traditional opportunistic maintenance strategy. Moreover, the optimal maintenance combination is also provided.