Expert-based FMEA of wind turbine system

This paper presents the results of a Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) conducted for wind turbine (WT) systems. The FMEA was performed on the functional modes of WT sub-systems in order to understand its performance of each sub-system, and to identify weaknesses in the respective sub-systems of WT considered. Sensitivity analysis had been done to investigate the cross-spreading of unreliability between sub-systems in the WT and a ranking of critical subassemblies was prepared on the basis of data supplied by experts that took part in the study. Overall, it was observed that crowbar protection and gearbox were found to be the two most critical components of WT given a reference to the Risk Priority Number (RPN) value of 200. Also, some design and improvement of these components could be envisaged to help improve the performance of the entire WT system by means of reducing the number of failures.