Wind power plants sometimes shut down due to diverse failure mechanisms and must therefore be maintained. These maintenance activities are costly due to logistics and delay-especially in the offshore sector. It is possible to model dynamic evolving mechanisms of aging in a mathematical form so that a reliable prediction of a future failure can be computed. For example, we can say that a bearing will fail within 59 hours from now because the vibration will then exceed the allowed limits. This information allows a maintenance activity to be planned in advance and thus saves collateral damage and a longer outage.
For complete details on this case study, go to: Failures of Wind Power Plants