Cost-Effective Maintenance Plan for Multiple Defect Types in Wind Turbine Blades

In any organization, one of the top priorities of management is to keep the downtime as minimal as possible. In order to achieve this, it is important to have effective maintenance plans that not only help attain high availability but also be cost effective at the same time. For a product like wind turbine blade, where reaching out to the locations of wind farms itself potentially costs more than the maintenance activity, it becomes even more important that the maintenance plans be cost effective. The complexity in creating such maintenance plans becomes prevalent owing to the fact that there exist several kinds of defects which can crop up in the product during its operation. Typically, the wind turbine blade can have defects that can be grouped into laminate, bondline, components, operational and cosmetic defects due to different physics of failure resulting in different reliability parameters for each defect type which makes it practically difficult to have a single maintenance plan which can cover and minimize all defect occurrences. Hence it is vital that a model should be worked out to create multiple maintenance plans for different defect groups and allow the flexibility to superimpose them creating a master maintenance plan.