Professor John Dalsgaard Sørensen, Aalborg University, delivered on of the plenary lectures at the annual ESREL conference.
The ESREL conference is organized by ESRA, European Safety and Reliability Association, and took this year place in Amsterdam.
The title of Professor Sørensen’s talk was “Reliability Assessment of Wind Turbines”. Below is the abstract from his ESREL paper.
Reduction of cost of energy for wind turbines are very important in order to make wind energy competitive compared to other energy sources. Therefore the turbine components should be designed to have sufficient reliability but also not be too costly (and safe). This paper presents models for uncertainty modeling and reliability assessment of especially the structural components such as tower, blades, substructure and foundation. But since the function of a wind turbine is highly dependent on many electrical and mechanical components as well as a control system also reliability aspects of these components are discussed and it is described how there reliability influences the reliability of the structural components. Two illustrative examples are presented considering uncertainty modeling, reliability assessment and calibration of partial safety factors for structural wind turbine components exposed to extreme loads and fatigue, respectively.
[mappress]
Press release, October 14, 2013; Image: esrel2013