Reliability and sensitivity analysis of a maintainable energy system under priority repair

The wind power industry, as one of the fastest-expanding renewable energy industries, experiences high failure rates along with high operating and maintenance costs. Among the different components of a wind turbine, the drive system (DS) is critical in transmission, resulting in a higher failure rate and longer downtime. The prime objective of this work is to determine the reliability of the drive system of a wind turbine under three repair policies. In this article, the authors use reliability analytical methods that are not only applicable to wind turbines but relate to any maintainable system. A quantitative study is carried out to point out differences in all three repair techniques. To analyze the repairs under priority, a flexible class of bivariate stochastic processes is proposed to incorporate the effects, modelled by a copula function. The Markov approach is used and implemented with the supplementary variable technique to estimate the time-dependent reliability and failure analysis.