A Combined Methodology for the Realization of Failure Modes, Effect and Criticality Analysis to Wind Turbines

The use of renewable sources has taken a leading role in the electric power generation industry, particularly, wind energy is an important part of the energy generation matrix. However, this technology faces great technical and economic challenges such as high operation and maintenance costs. For this reason, it is important for wind farm managers to identify the areas in which to focus the resources destined for maintenance, thus increasing the availability of wind turbines more efficiently. Given the need for tools that allow identifying vulnerabilities in the energy transformation process, this paper proposes a methodology based on failure modes, effects and criticality analysis applied to wind turbines to perform a qualitative and quantitative assessment of failure characteristics. As a result, by implementing this methodology in a real wind farm located in Costa Rica, using operational data from the wind turbines, the most impactful failure modes on the analyzed wind turbines are shown when comparing the risk and cost approaches. These results are expected to contribute in improvements to maintenance plans and as a base for the development and implementation of failure detection systems in the most critical failure modes determined through the analysis.