A review of methods to increase the availability of wind turbine generator systems

Availability is an important factor to be considered when designing wind turbine generator systems. The quest for increased availability is based on the following five design approaches — design for component reliability, active control for reliability, design for fault tolerance, prognostics, and design for maintainability. This paper reviews methods focussing on the first three, i.e. component reliability, active control, and fault tolerance. The paper further identifies some promising directions for further research.