Wind Turbine Blade Failure Rates

[ICbrokethings]

Does anyone have any information or exmaple figures for wind turbine blade failure rates? I'm performing a risk assessment for siting a turbine near a gas pipeline and need some idea of failure frequency. Thanks

 

[BigInch]

Don't you mean tower collapse?
The chance of blade failure X chance of a slung blade coming down and hitting the pipeline must be really really really small.

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"Pumping accounts for 20% of the world’s energy used by electric motors and 25-50% of the total electrical energy usage in certain industrial facilities."-DOE statistic (Note: Make that 99% for pipeline companies)

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.live.com/

 

[cranky108]

Your not concerned about inducing currents into the pipeline?

I would think the blade failure rate is very small, just judging from the lack of news paper stories on the subject.

 

[dpc]

You will never get any wind turbine manufacturer to provide any hard data regarding blade failure rates. Tower failures are a little harder to keep a secret.

 

[metengr]

The problem with wind turbine blade failure rate is that 99.9999% of blade cracks or blade manufacturing defects that propagate into structural cracks are detected before catastrophic failure. Most of the wind turbine OEMS are starting to have enhance condition monitoring systems that can detect blade cracking and warn before catastrophic failure.

Tower collapse is even a more rare event and I would bet that the extremely low catastrophic bade failure rate is higher than a tower collapse.

 

[Sparweb]

"Tower collapse is even a more rare event and I would bet that the extremely low catastrophic bade failure rate is higher than a tower collapse.'

A catastrophic blade failure while the blades are turning can lead to a tower collapse on large wind turbines.

Try contacting Paul Gipe (

http://www.wind-works.org).

He's been working on large turbines for decades, and he's been a bit of a "watchdog", too.


Steven Fahey, CET