Wind farms are expensive projects and should be efficiently maintained. Onshore or offshore, the design, manufacture and installation of wind turbines are long processes, an investment for the future, a subject of promises and high expectations. Wind power is considered as one of the main alternatives to burning fossil fuels. Furthermore it is clean, produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, consumes no water and is deployed on little surfaces. Considering all the mentioned factors, the environmental impact is far less problematic than the one of non renewable power sources.
Predictive and prescriptive industrial maintenance routines
A wind farm is a group of several hundred individual wind turbines distributed over an extended area. Their industrial maintenance might be quite challenging and therefore the deployment of a reliable CMMS is indispensable. Mobile version, user-friendliness, geolocation tools, ERP connections and sensors integration are all a must.
Mobility Work features all necessary characteristics to ease and streamline the massive maintenance process of wind power farms.
The Complexity of Wind Turbine Equipment
Wind turbines convert the wind kinetic energy into mechanical power, which can be turned into electricity. Almost all devices have the same design with a horizontal or vertical axis, wind turbine having an upwind rotor with three blades, attached to a nacelle on top of a tall tubular tower. Wind turbines usually differentiate in their foundations. There are bases for onshore, fixed offshore installations and for floating designs. Even though wind turbines operate on simple principles, the diversity of the equipment suggest different maintenance needs and approaches.
Mobility Work can easily adapt to any type of wind power installation and fulfil the project’s needs by improving the maintenance process and, if necessary, leveraging it to predictive and prescriptive maintenance programs.
The Wind Power Sector’s Challenges
One of the biggest industrial maintenance challenges of a wind farm is its impressive size. Some wind farms deploy up to 150 wind turbines, all looking the same, all having the same function and positioned on a very large terrain. To save time, efforts and cost and to be able to react accordingly to an unplanned failure, technicians should be able to localize the right asset fast and easy.
Mobility Work features an integrated geolocation tool to streamline, centralize and manage asset tracking for an optimized maintenance performance.
All news related to ongoing interventions are available from Mobility Work mobile application’s newsfeed, available on iOS and Android.
Furthermore wind speed is not as predictable as the sea tides for example. Therefore wind power delivers rather variable outcome and should be deployed together with other electric power sources in order to secure a reliable supply. This includes many additional power-management techniques such as exporting and importing power, reducing demand when wind production is low and many more. All of them require the deployment of additional assets which have to be maintained in parallel to wind turbines.
The deployment of a next-gen CMMS as Mobility Work implies the integration of lean maintenance methods, which impact everything from reliability, profitability and safety to environmental compliance and asset life.
Big-sized Assets Don’t Necessarily Need Expensive Maintenance
Mobility Work is a user-friendly CMMS, aiming at easing and upgrading industrial maintenance routines. The solution doesn’t require any additional trainings or specific IT knowledge and skills. Its integration will cut maintenance costs by minimizing unscheduled expensive maintenance interventions and allowing wind farms to run far more efficiently.
A CMMS, As Flexible and Innovative as the Wind Power Sector
Mobility Work updates are running automatically. Our team is ready to add a new, out-of-the-box feature or adapt an existing one to the project and customer’s individual needs at any time. The product can easily evolve with your organization and support when making critical decisions. Mobility Work connects, evaluates, stores, analyzes and notifies 24/7. Every team member can access it anytime from anywhere on any type of smart device.
Although maintaining equipment at a wind farm has some unique challenges, the wind industry is in general open to innovations and can certainly pursue some of the latest digital trends as the adoption of continuous asset monitoring, the utilization of pertinent predictive maintenance technologies and, going even further, prescriptive programs based on cognitive analytics.
Wind power is one of the industrial sectors of the future, expected to deliver quality, safety and environmental standards satisfying customer demands, and all this at a reasonable price.
Here are some improvements you can expect from the implementation of Mobility Work:
- Obtaining, storing and analyzing accurate equipment data
- Adopting beneficial maintenance strategies (preventive, predictive and/or prescriptive)
- Implementing a reliable spare parts management
- Improving internal communication
- Speeding up repairs
- Minimizing failures and downtime
- Reducing maintenance costs
- Storing historical data, intervention records, plans, drawings and all possible documentation related to assets’ health
Investing in innovations and following technological advances has always played a critical role in the expansion of the sector. Therefore wind industry should and can afford to look toward latest maintenance trends.
Mobility Work’s calendar feature allows you to schedule all your preventive and predictive maintenance tasks.
Mobility Work will support you in the improvement of existing preventive techniques and the establishment of new predictive and prescriptive ones.
The mass production of wind turbines is a relatively “young” industry where equipment maintenance data can play an essential role when taking important decisions. A next-gen CMMS can help the industry to advance in its technological development, encouraging the deployment of latest industrial maintenance routines based on condition-monitoring and predictive programs.
