MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT & ENGINEERING 2019

Assignment 4: Performing a Mechanism based Failure Analysis

Due date assignment report: October 25 (18:00 hours)

Due date peer review process: November 1 (18:00 hours)
Responsible lecturer: Tiedo Tinga
Expected time needed: 24 hours
Part of presentation: no, feedback is given / received through peer-review process.

Perform a Mechanism based Failure Analysis on a given system to solve

recurring failures on the system.

The system to be analyzed is the same as in assignment 2, i.e. the Enercon E126
(7.5 MW) wind turbine.

The MBFA procedure proposed in the booklet (Tinga, T., Mechanism based Failure
analysis, 2012) must be followed and all steps must be described and motivated.
However, as the FMEA already has been performed for this system (assignment 2),
the effort in creating a fault tree (which can be very extensive if all possible failures
are included) will be limited. This means that:
• an overview of all possible failure modes is already available, and the fault tree
can rather easily be derived, but should represent the appropriate relation with
the (to be) defined top event, and the relations between the different failures;
• the priority in failures can be obtained in two ways:
o from the RPN values calculated during the FMEA in assignment 2
(maybe some RPN values must be recalculated when they were not
included in the FMEA),
o from a Pareto analysis on (estimated) costs, downtime and observed
failure frequency;
A clear motivation must be provided for the priorization criterion you think is
most suitable in this case;
• the focus in this assignment will be on the final part, the root cause analysis,
which should be performed for at least three different failures. Pay sufficient
 attention to determining the right failure mechanism and clearly motivate /
describe how you determined it.
• Also clearly describe how the failure and associated load is related to the
usage / operation of the wind turbine.

If you need more information or details which are not provided, make assumptions
and communicate them in the report. Use academic literature and refer to the
relevant literature in a meaningful and correct way.