Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 14, numbers 1 and 2, 2021 // View article

Reliability and Performances of Power Electronic Converters in Wind Turbine Applications

Authors:
Aimad Alili
Mamadou Baïlo Camara
Brayima Dakyo
Jacques Raharijaona

Keywords: Electronic Converters; Wind turbine; reliability; trends; Failure rate.

Abstract:
The reliability of wind turbines system (WTS) is becoming a key issue as the penetration rate of wind energy is continuing to grow in the last decades. The reliability of a wind turbine is the reliability of all the components and sub-systems that compose the entire system. In this paper, we present a study of the wind turbines structures, currently used components and technologies. A review of wind turbine maintenance data from multiple wind turbines firms installed in different countries and different climatic zones. The study aims to identify the most critical components of the different technologies used in WTS and the effect of the wind turbine structure on the global failure rate of the WTS. We focus on two of the most used configurations in WTS (Variable speed wind turbine with partial-scale converter and Variable speed wind turbine with a full-scale converter) and the power converters associated with these configurations. These converters represent one of the most fragile components according to the data of major reliability studies. The comparison between the reliability rate of the different WTS topologies show the importance of the choice of the configuration and power converter topologies to ensure the availability of WTS.

Pages: 61 to 72

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2021. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2021

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679