Influence of The Personnel Availability on Offshore Wind Farm Maintenance

Abstract

Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) have rising importance for energy provision of many regions worldwide. However, their harsh environment leads to considerably higher failure rates and degradation compared to its onshore counterparts. Consequently, OWFs require well-established maintenance processes in order to provide required operational availability of all wind turbines. Amongst the several factors impacting these processes the personnel plays an important role, bearing in mind that no maintenance is possible without having access to technicians or seamen operating the required vessel. This work proposes a comprehensive model for evaluating the actual impact the personnel availability has on the corrective maintenance processes of an OWF and, consequently, its energy production. Therefore, maintenance processes and WT failure rates based on reported data are considered. Furthermore, a pandemic model is employed in order to elaborate the possible impact a health crisis can have on the operational availability of an OWF. Results indicate that the monthly energy production can drop by up to 74% in case of a constant reduction of the personnel by 50%, while a worst case pandemic scenario results in a 23% lower energy production over the whole year.

Validation of copula-based weather generator for maintenance model of offshore wind farm

“…Simulation studies aimed for investigation of selected KPIs and validation of the novel copula approach are based on maintenance model introduced in Skobiej, et al (2020) and described in Sect. 3.…”

“…The employed simulation model is based on a previous work (Skobiej, et al 2020). The model consists of two major components: Fault Tree (FT) module that generates the failures and a module for maintaining the failures, as depicted in Fig.…”

“…Another important weather constraint is daylight condition ({0|1}, where 0 represents night or zero-visibility conditions). In here, we adopt following common limit values (Skobiej, et al 2020): wave height < 2.5 m, wind speed < 25 ms −1 , daylight = 1. The time periods, in which all three conditions are being fulfilled, are considered as operational windows.…”

“…The presented article is based in particular on two previous studies conducted by the authors. In case of copula-based approach, the background work is introduced in Niemi and Sill Torres (2021); the maintenance model essentials are presented in Skobiej, et al (2020). Therefore, the current study can be regarded as a direct evolution of previous research.…”

An Expert-Driven Probabilistic Assessment of the Safety and Security of Offshore Wind Farms

“…In addition, several studies have discussed the use of KPIs for operations management and maintenance of offshore and onshore wind turbines [12,15]. Safety-related KPIs discussed in [9,12,16,17] refer either to more technical aspects (reliability), to the occupational safety of the O&M personnel (health, injury prevention), or to the handling of disruptive environmental influences (weather). The relationships between safety and security requirements and economic, environmental, and regulatory compliance requirements are rarely discussed [16,18].…”