Case Study: ReliaWind achieves higher offshore wind turbine reliability and availability with PTC Windchill Quality Solutions

ReliaWind - Customer Case Study

ReliaWind is a pan‑European consortium formed to improve the reliability, operation, and maintenance of next‑generation onshore and offshore wind turbines so offshore deployments can become as cost‑competitive as onshore ones. Faced with harsh marine environments, difficult access, corrosion and extreme load cases — and EU targets requiring high operational availability (well above 97%) and lower cost of energy — ReliaWind partnered with PTC and used PTC Windchill Quality Solutions to analyze field failures and guide design and maintenance improvements.

Using PTC Windchill Prediction, OpSim and FMEA, ReliaWind standardized field data from more than 250 wind farms (failure records from over 290 turbines), identified the highest‑failure subsystems (rotor, pitch, power and nacelle), ran reliability block diagram simulations and performed FMEA on 81 failure modes to prioritize corrective actions. PTC’s tools enabled trade‑off studies for redundancies, quantified availability behavior and supported development of common protocols, remote monitoring and O&M optimization applications — delivering a validated data set and actionable recommendations that materially improve reliability analysis and help drive the consortium’s availability and cost‑of‑energy objectives.