A Review of Methods to Increase the Availability of Wind Turbine Generator Systems

Availability is an important factor to be considered when designing wind turbine generator systems. The quest for increasing availability is based on the following five design approaches - design for component reliability, active control for reliability, design for fault tolerance, prognostics, and design for maintainability. This paper reviews...

Chances in wind energy: A probalistic approach to wind turbine fatigue design

Wind is becoming an ever more important source of renewable energy: installed wind turbine power now stands at 60,000 MW worldwide, providing 0.6% of world electricity demand. Still it is important that the cost of wind energy is brought down further, which means that wind turbines must be designed to be exactly as strong as necessary, but no...