An Approach to Supporting Maintenance of Offshore Wind Turbine Blades

Offshore wind turbine blades suffer from various faults such as blade angle asymmetry, icing, and bends. Replacement of rotor blades normally involves heavy transportation (e.g., vessel and crane), and dependency on weather conditions. As a result, wind turbines come to a long standstill and costs on energy production increase. One approach to reducing the downtime and costs is to apply a proper maintenance strategy, e.g., corrective, time-based, failure-based, condition-based, or reliabilitycentered maintenance. This article introduces an approach, which combines the knowledgebased approach with the force analysis technique, to supporting maintenance of offshore wind turbine blades. The approach solves the semantic ambiguity of offshore wind information and provides the possibility of monitoring the performance of wind turbine blades in real-time, leading to advanced alarms when needed. The approach can be adapted and applied to other wind turbine components.