Failure Analysis of Wind Turbines by Probability Density Evolution Method

Abstract:

The aim of this study is to present an efficient and accurate method for estimation of the failure probability of wind turbine structures which work under turbulent wind load. The classical method for this is to fit one of the extreme value probability distribution functions to extracted maxima of the response of wind turbine. However this approach may contain high amount of uncertainty due to arbitrariness of the data and the distributions chosen. Therefore less uncertain methods are meaningful in this direction. The most natural approach in this respect is the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. This however has no practical interest due to its excessive computational load. This problem can alternatively be tackled if the evolution of the probability density function (PDF) of the response process can be realized. The evolutionary PDF can then be integrated on the boundaries of the problem, i.e. the exceedance threshold of the response, which results in the accurate values of the failure probability. For this reason we propose to use the probability density evolution method (PDEM). PDEM can alternatively be used to obtain distribution of the extreme values of the response process by simulation. This approach requires less computational effort than integrating the evolution of the PDF; but may have less accuracy. In this paper we present the results of failure probability estimation by the PDEM. The results will then be compared to the extrapolated values from the extreme value distribution fits to the samples response values.

• Periodical: Key Engineering Materials (Volumes 569-570)
• Pages: 579-586
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/KEM.569-570.579
• Online since: July 2013
• Authors: M.T. Sichani, S.R.K. Nielsen, W.F. Liu, J.B. Chen, J. Li, Y.B. Peng
• Keywords: Failure Analysis, Monte Carlo, PDEM, Wind Turbine (WT)

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