Several thousand wind turbines across Denmark and in other countries will reach 20 years operational lifetime, the conventionally assumed design life, in the next few years. Thus there is an urgent need to put together a process for determining whether the lifetime of these wind turbines can be extended past their certified design life. Such a process needs to be developed from a point of view of safety and integrity of the turbine components upon continued operation beyond its presently intended lifetime. In line with the MEGAVIND Strategy Report, July 2016 on “Extending the Useful Lifetime of a Wind Turbine”, it is required to be shown that the risk of failure upon continued operation is acceptable and that the turbine can be certified to operate beyond its present design life.
This main objective of this project is to demonstrate procedures that can quantify the risk of failure, the remaining structural reliability and the maintenance costs upon extending the life of operational wind turbines nearing their end of certified life. These procedures will be based on the level of available data that is recorded, such as, observations from maintenance of different turbines, multi-year inspection records, SCADA records, loads measurements or other measurements collected in a systematic way on turbines approaching end of lifetime in Denmark.
Based on the validated lifetime prediction procedures developed in the project, recommendations will be made for a new IEC technical specification (TS) on Lifetime extension.