Methodology and results of the reliawind reliability field study

The EU FP7 Reliawind project has the aim to identify and understand critical failures and their mechanisms through quantitative studies of detailed wind farm data. A common wind turbine taxonomy and a universal database structure for storing downtime events from multiple manufacturer's turbines have been defined. Systematic and consistent processes have been developed to deal with historical data from wind farm Owners and Operators. Data including 10-minute SCADA, service records/work orders and alarm logs have been analysed to determine downtime events within the common taxonomy. The downtime events have been analysed to determine the distribution of failure rates and downtimes between the sub-assemblies. To date 31,500 downtime events have already been added to the common database structure and the database is still expanding.