Wind Power Plants Windräder Wind Energy Landscape
The operation and maintaining of any equipment are really essential to have a better life of such equipment. When we consider the Operation and Maintenance of the Wind Power Plants there are several specific things to consider on. The modern wind power plants are designed to have a lifetime of 20 years and the operation hours are about 120000 hours.
Technically wind power plants need to withstand electrical and mechanical stresses. So proper operation and maintainers standards are maintained such plants for smooth operation over a longer period. In most modern wind power plants, the controlling applications are performed by computer-related programs. However, the performance of such equipment is monitors on the daily, weekly and monthly basis.
There are several factors need to consider when the maintenance of the wind power plants. This is a very critical segment in wind power operation which directly involves the profitability of the Windpower segment.
One of the main objectives of the Operation and Maintains of this power plant is to keep the cost of production as much as minimum level.
There are several reasons behind the O&M of wind power plants and major reasons are to increase the wind availability of the wind turbine and to reduce the maintenance cost.
If we consider the maintainer of the wind turbine it can classify into three parts such as.
- General Maintenance
- unscheducal Maintenance
- Schedule Maintenance
It is really essential to perform mentioned procedures to reduce the downtime, Improve the efficiency and lifetime of the wind power plant. We are planning to discuss these three types of maintenance of the wind power plant in separately.
General maintenance of the wind power plants
The General Maintenance of the wind power plants is normally done one or two times per year.
The routine Maintenance is fallen into the general Maintenance category. Following are several general Maintenance perform in the wind power plants.
- Normal these routing maintains are performing in every three months.
- Record and report the performance of the wind turbine periodically
- Maintenance of the scrutiny reports
- Maintenance of the inventory of spears
The mentioned type of the maintenance is the really basic type of maintenance which helps to have a better understanding of the entire system of the wind power plant. Most of the things are document related work and however, it is essential to perform such activities to have a better wind power system.
Unscheduled maintenance of the wind power plants
Unscheduled maintenance is also known as breakdown maintenance and the maintains are perfume when the machine is a defect.
The performance of the wind power plant or farm is monitoring through a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA). So when the system is diagnosis some issues or faults the system detects it very fast. So it is really easy to find out which part get fault condition in the wind power plant.
To solve such faults it can use the operation manuals which given by the manufacturer to understand to solve such faults. The unscheduled faults or breakdown faults can categorize as following.
- Faults by wear and tear
- Human-based error
- Operational errors (such as yaw error, pitching errors, excessive vibrations etc)
- The complexity of the wind turbine
- Natural disasters (Like Heavy storm or lighting)
The unscheduled maintenance is really important to attended and this is the most vital type of maintenance to perform.
Break down of the wind power plant are also affect commercially. When the downtime of such maintenance is affected in the longer period it got an impact on commercially.
Scheduled maintenance of the wind power plants
The scheduled maintenance is also known as preventive maintains. Normally the preventive maintained are conducted two times per year in modern wind turbines.
Scheduled maintains is a pre-planned maintains process and normally the manufacture of the wind power plant provide the preventive maintenance schedule for the better performance of the wind turbine.
Normally the schedule Maintenance have consisted following items
- Routine checkups
- Periodic testing
- Periodic Maintenance
- Blade cleaning
- Higher voltage equipment maintenance.
It is really important to perform preventive maintained to perform better running conditions of the wind power plant.
It is necessary to consider several factors before performing preventive Maintenance on wind power plants such as.
- Weather condition of the outer environment
- The availability of the manpower to perform such Maintenance activities
- Availability of the necessary equipment
- Access permit to perform such tasks
- Briefing the crew regarding the Maintenance work
- Follow necessary safety rules and regulation to follow such Maintenance
Most of the mention activities are also involved the safety of the humans and the equipment of such plants.
It is really important to conduct the scheduled maintenance by obtaining the minimum downtime of the wind power plant to reduce the effect of the commercial impacts.
Operation and Maintenance of Offshore Wind Power Plants
We also discussed that there are two types of a wind turbine which depend on the location of the construction.
According to that offshore wind power plants are located in the sea. The operation and maintenance procedure of such offshore power plants are difficult and complex compare with general onshore wind power plants.
Most of the offshore wind plants are very huge so the downtime of such plant cost greater commercial losses.
So the Maintenance of such plants is really important to reduce the number of downtimes. Since the offshore wind technology at still development stage so there are very few people who experience in such O&M activities.
So as we explained earlier the O&M of offshore are really sophisticated.
Hope that you have got some basic understanding about the operation and Maintenance procedure of the wind power plant in this article.
In here we have discussed three main types of maintains which perfume in wind power plants and some of the basics of the O&M of the Offshore type wind power plants.