Open Access

In Germany’s transition to a more sustainable industrial landscape, electricity generated by wind turbines (WT) remains a mainstay of the energy mix. Operating and maintenance costs, which account for roughly 25% of electricity generation costs in onshore WTs make improvements of maintenance activities a key lever in the economic operation of WTs. Prescriptive maintenance is a possible approach for improved maintenance activities. It is a concept where asset condition data is used to recommend specific actions and has great potential for the operation of wind parks. However, especially small, but also large wind park operators, and maintenance service providers often struggle with the implementation of such a new maintenance approach. As a part of the research project ReStroK, a learning game has been developed to support the training and familiarization of maintenance technicians with the concepts and underlying principles of this maintenance approach. In this paper, the concept for the development of a learning game will be presented. Multiple scenarios for its usage and their corresponding requirements will be discussed and an overview over the game will be given.

Operating and maintenance costs, which account for 25% of total costs, are a powerful lever in reducing the electricity generation costs of onshore wind turbines (WT). These costs can be reduced by a condition-orientated maintenance approach. A condition-oriented maintenance strategy optimizes maintenance tasks by executing them with varying levels of detail and focus depending on the system and life cycle phase. OEMs evaluate operating data and structured data from the maintenance history for this purpose, but SMEs lack the capacity for this evaluation. In particular, the unstructured descriptive comments in the maintenance reports generated by service technicians remain unused. In this work, we propose a framework to incorporate this information from the maintenance reports along with the status records from the SCADA system. For this purpose, a mechanism has to be developed to make the contents of the service reports machine-evaluable. The mechanism used in this approach is an ontology, which enables the codification of implicit knowledge such as the experience knowledge of the service technicians. The ontology’s purpose is to link status codes of onshore WT with historical maintenance reports and thereby enabling an automated evaluation. Using an API (application programming interface), the ontology can be integrated into an algorithm to analyse status data and maintenance documents. In this manner, recommendations for actions can be derived and maintenance tasks can be optimized.

The road to smart maintenance requires a roadmap to be a successful one - In this presentation we show how companies can achieve excellence and which key success factors are to be considered.

Electricity generated by wind turbines (WT) is a pillar of the transition to renewable energy [1]. In order to economically utilize WTs, operating and maintenance costs, which account for 25% of total electricity generation costs in onshore WTs, are a focus of cost reduction activities [2]. A prescriptive maintenance approach can support in achieving this goal. Prescriptive maintenance is a maintenance approach, where asset condition data is collected and analyzed to recommend specific actions to prevent breakdowns and reduce downtimes. However, the processing and analysis of data is quite complex. Especially unstructured data (such as comments of service technicians in free text fields) is often left unused, as companies, mostly SMEs lack the capacity to carry out these analyses. In this work we propose an approach to utilize the information from service reports, maintenance reports as well as status records from SCADA systems for the development of a prescriptive maintenance approach to onshore WTs. To achieve this, an ontology was utilized in this approach to codify implicit knowledge of service technicians and aid in making unstructured data usable for further analysis. The ontology was used to link historical service and maintenance reports with status codes, thus enabling automated analysis. In interviews with WT topic experts and through further research, damage mechanisms and corresponding maintenance measures were identified and a measure catalogue was developed to support service and maintenance activities. The recognition of the root cause of problems allows for a prescriptive maintenance approach that recommends targeted actions to reduce downtimes and optimize maintenance activities, it also allows to effectively control the outcome of maintenance activities and optimize their execution.