Influence of extended potential-to-functional failure intervals through condition monitoring systems on offshore wind turbine availability

Condition monitoring systems are deployed in various industries for decades contributing to optimizing operational performance and maintenance efforts. Several publications address this potential for application in the offshore wind energy industry; however, none attempts to quantify the impact that longer warning times ahead of a failure would have on asset availability. The aim of this paper is to bridge this gap by considering particularly the access restrictions for offshore operations through a probabilistic model which simulates existence of different condition monitoring systems on offshore wind turbines in the time domain. Results of this study quantify the positive impact that a longer warning time of potential-to-functional failure (P-F interval) has on availability, highlighting that variation of maintenance strategy through transformation of unplanned activities into planned interventions that can be conducted during a suitable weather window ahead of a component failure can lead to reduced operation and maintenance (O&M) costs.