RAM-LCC aplicado a parque de aerogeneradores

One of the main sources of costs within assets’ life cycle (LCC) are Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs, which appear during the whole assets’ life and in some cases they can represent as much as ten times the capital investment costs (i.e. CAPEX). Despite
this fact, in general terms, few sectors consider them a key factor within their business strategies. Hence, the advantage of reducing these costs and improving economic results is rarely taken. In order to reduce O&M costs, following the correct maintenance strategy plays a very important role, as it determines when an asset should be maintained or replaced in order to reduce long term costs. Particularly, in the case of the wind energy sector, the importance of choosing the correct maintenance strategy is a key factor due to the high O&M costs, principally caused by logistics and wind turbines’ operational behavior characteristics. In the proposed research, a RAM-LCC (Reliability, Availability and Maintainability) analysis has been developed in order to decide which maintenance strategy should be followed for reducing long term costs. In fact, the model proposed gives the advantage of identifying adequate opportunistic maintenance strategies considering at the same time condition based maintenance (CBM) strategies. Furthermore it allows evaluating the performance of installed Condition Monitoring Systems (CMS), according to ROI analysis. For this research, wind turbines’ reliability, availability and maintainability costs have been modeled and calculated based on real field data.

DOI / link: http://www.ndt.net/events/EWSHM2016/app/content/Paper/49_Erguido.pdf