Research on Wind Turbine Safety Analysis: Failure Analysis, Reliability Analysis, and Risk Assessment

Wind power is an affordable, efficient, and abundant source of electricity. It is pollution-free and cost-competitive with energy from new coal-and gas-fired power plants in many regions. The wind industry has been growing rapidly in recent years. The rapid development of wind power industry requires higher performance and reliability of equipment. Thus, safety problem is extremely important to large scale wind turbines, as make safety engineering become the focus of WTs R&D. Thus, relevant researches have gained increasing attention in the wind industry. Accordingly, this article reviews the basic analysis types and their corresponding applications in WTs system safety analysis, aiming to let more experts deeply understand the current research status and also provide some guidance for relevant researches. (C) 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 35: 1848-1861, 2016