Availability of Wind Turbine Converters With Extreme Modularity

Modularity is promising from a view to increasing turbine availability through fault tolerant operation as well as reduced downtimes, especially for offshore wind turbines. This paper focuses on a quantitative analysis of large scale (or extreme) modularity in power electronic converters of wind tur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on sustainable energy 2018-10, Vol.9 (4), p.1772-1782
Main Authors: Shipurkar, Udai, Dong, Jianning, Polinder, Henk, Ferreira, Jan A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Availability
Case studies
Converters
Failure analysis
Failure rates
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
Generators
Maintenance engineering
Markov modeling
Markov processes
Mathematical models
Modularity
Offshore operations
power electronic converter
Power electronics
Quantitative analysis
Reduction
Reliability
Turbines
Turbogenerators
Wind power
wind turbine
Wind turbines
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Summary:Modularity is promising from a view to increasing turbine availability through fault tolerant operation as well as reduced downtimes, especially for offshore wind turbines. This paper focuses on a quantitative analysis of large scale (or extreme) modularity in power electronic converters of wind turbine generator systems. It uses mathematical models to investigate the effect of the choice of module number on the availability of a converter. It further analyses the availability in conditions where increased levels of modularity lead to a reduction of failure rates in the system. The paper extends this analysis by quantifying the benefits for a 10-MW case study turbine. Finally, it concludes that extreme modularity holds merit only when it is accompanied by a reduction in failure rates.
ISSN:1949-3029
1949-3037
DOI:10.1109/TSTE.2018.2813402