State of the Art of Maintenance Applied to Wind Turbines

This paper is aimed to deal with maintenance aspects related to devices which are involved in the generation of electric power from clean sources as the wind energy. Particularly, the objective of this research is to analyze all those important studies that have provided a better view on the maintenance of wind turbines. With that purpose, this document starts introducing the concept of O&M activities applied to wind turbines. A brief historical approach regarding the maintenance of these devices is described in order to continue with a review the condition based maintenance applied to these wind turbines. Due to the huge amount of data that are in used during the operation of these wind farms, the paper includes a section dealing with the data management and how they can help to take decisions considering that information which is more important and really profitable for the maintenance area. Finally, this paper ends summarizing the main aspects of the research in the conclusions section, underlining those important issues related to the wind turbines and their state of the art.