Demonstration of Requirements for Life Extension of Wind Turbines beyond their Design Life (Life Wind)

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. This will be done by experts in the field from the service industry at ALL NRG and from the Dansk Vindmøllerforening, who will inspect and collect data from several aging turbines. The scope is valid for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. The project will assess the structural reliability at the end of the present design life and quantify the risk of failure of different turbine components upon life extension by using tools that process the existing data systematically. The developed process for life extension will be validated by the wind turbine manufactures and wind farm owners in the project with respect to applicability on their respective commercial turbines. European Energy A/S and DONG energy will also use the developed methods as applied to their turbine fleets to understand if life monitoring can be made on continual basis without waiting for end of the certified lifetime. The process will be guided by DNV GL from a certification point of view. The learnings from the project will also be shared with the IEC RE forum which is presently looking into this aspect from a global perspective.