by Meyer, Tobias
Abstract:
Wind turbine life-time is limited by fatigue loads. Usually, turbines are designed for a minimum service life of 20 years. In most cases, some usable service life remains after the end of the planned time of operation, which can sometimes be exploited by extending the service life period. However, structural integrity must be assessed for each individual turbine to show that it can continue to operate safely. However, there are cases in which it is not possible or desirable to have a lifetime extension. Reasons can be due to e.g. economic, legal or technical constraints. A different operating strategy comes into play in these cases: maximum energy yield during the pre-specified useful life of the turbines is desired. Increased power of a wind turbine, for example by employing highly dynamic control or by accepting short-term overloading, can usually only be achieved at the expense of increased degradation. At the same time, this must not lead to unexpected early failures so as not to diminish system reliability. Ideally, the power of the turbine is increased just enough to distribute the damage over its complete useful lifetime. This way, the physically limited service life is exploited completely and at the same time, maximum energy production is achieved. Fraunhofer IWES is developing higher-level control strategies for wind turbines for this purpose. They detect the current degradation state of the turbine and feed this information back to the operational control. Closed-loop reliability control is comprised of the detection of the current degradation state, determination of the required turbine configuration and an adjustment of the operational controllers. Reliability control thus autonomously adjusts the behavior of a standard turbine to its individual site.
Reference:
Meyer, T.: Expert talk: Reliability control. Online presentation, 2018. (Recording available at: https://youtu.be/WnYG3kTzi4s)
Bibtex Entry:
@misc{Meyer_2018,
howpublished = {Presentation},
type={Online presentation},
author = {Meyer, Tobias},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-12-14},
title = {Expert talk: Reliability control},
address = {online},
note = {Recording available at: \url{https://youtu.be/WnYG3kTzi4s}},
abstract= {Wind turbine life-time is limited by fatigue loads. Usually, turbines are designed for a minimum service life of 20 years. In most cases, some usable service life remains after the end of the planned time of operation, which can sometimes be exploited by extending the service life period. However, structural integrity must be assessed for each individual turbine to show that it can continue to operate safely.
However, there are cases in which it is not possible or desirable to have a lifetime extension. Reasons can be due to e.g. economic, legal or technical constraints. A different operating strategy comes into play in these cases: maximum energy yield during the pre-specified useful life of the turbines is desired. Increased power of a wind turbine, for example by employing highly dynamic control or by accepting short-term overloading, can usually only be achieved at the expense of increased degradation.
At the same time, this must not lead to unexpected early failures so as not to diminish system reliability. Ideally, the power of the turbine is increased just enough to distribute the damage over its complete useful lifetime. This way, the physically limited service life is exploited completely and at the same time, maximum energy production is achieved.
Fraunhofer IWES is developing higher-level control strategies for wind turbines for this purpose. They detect the current degradation state of the turbine and feed this information back to the operational control. Closed-loop reliability control is comprised of the detection of the current degradation state, determination of the required turbine configuration and an adjustment of the operational controllers. Reliability control thus autonomously adjusts the behavior of a standard turbine to its individual site.},
series = {Fraunhofer IWES}
}