Director, Wind and Solar Energy Assessments DNV GL, Massachusetts
Presentation Description: Owners and Operators (OOs) seek ways to improve the performance of their wind turbines, reduce downtime and service and maintenance cost, increase operational efficiency, extend the life of their assets and, overall, reduce the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCoE).
While the potential hidden within operational data, available for free from the turbines' SCADA systems, is clear, traditional desktop-based studies have generally been too expensive to be a viable investment for OOs. It is only recently, with the advent of affordable online digital analysis platforms, that operational data started to be routinely mined to identify any performance issues or trends that could be indicative of potential failures.
We have developed a structural integrity monitor, which makes use of 1Hz data to identify and track some of the main structural frequencies of a turbine and to highlight any significant changes over time or across turbines, which may be indicative of existing issues or incipient failure modes.
In this presentation we will provide details of the algorithm and we will present the results of two case studies, one focussing on monitoring of foundation integrity, the second focusing on the detection of blade pitch misalignment.
Methodology: 400+mb video showing the convergence of results. If possible, surveys can also engage the audience.
Learning Objectives:
Show how access to 1Hz data can be used to assess the reliability and performance of your wind turbine
Demonstrate the value of regular analysis of 1Hz data and to motivate the industry to move towards improved quality and frequency of turbine data outputs.
perform similar fast fourier transform analyses to better gauge 1) the reliability thru the health of the foundation, tower and blades and 2) the performance thru rotor imbalance and yaw misalignment detection
