Fatigue Reliability-based Inspection and Maintenance Planning of Gearbox Components in Wind Turbine Drivetrains

This paper introduces a reliability-based maintenance plan for wind turbine gearbox components. The gears and bearings are graded based on their fatigue damage and a maintenance map is developed to focus on those components with higher probability of fatigue failure and lower level of reliability. The main aim of this paper is to propose a method for developing the “vulnerability map” which can be used by maintenance teams to identify the …