Int J Adv Manuf Technol DOI 10.1007/s00170-015-7616-y ORIGINAL ARTICLE Towards farm-level health management of offshore wind farms for maintenance improvements Surya Teja Kandukuri 1 · Kjell G. Robbersmyr 1 · Hamid Reza Karimi 1 Received: 14 February 2015 / Accepted: 19 July 2015 © Springer-Verlag London 2015 Abstract This paper studies a conceptual architecture for health management of offshore wind farms. To this aim, various necessary enablers of a health management sys- tem are presented to improve reliability and availability while optimizing maintenance costs. The main focus lies on improving existing condition monitoring systems based on concepts of condition-based maintenance and relia- bility centered maintenance. A brief review of the rel- evant state-of-the-art is presented and gaps to be filled towards realization of such health management system are discussed. Keywords Health management · Offshore wind farm · Maintenance 1 Introduction Renewable energy sources are gaining importance due to depleting fossil fuel reserves and their adverse environmen- tal impact. The European Union (EU) aims to shift 20 %  Surya Teja Kandukuri surya.kandukuri@uia.no Kjell G. Robbersmyr kjell.g.robbersmyr@uia.no Hamid Reza Karimi hamid.r.karimi@uia.no 1 Faculty of Engineering and Science, Department of Engineering Sciences, University of Agder, 4879, Grimstad, Norway of its energy reliability to renewable energy resources by 2020 and the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) estimates about 14 % of this to be fulfilled by wind energy [1]. Higher wind energy production translates to larger wind farms and higher capacity turbines. Offshore wind farms (OWFs) have become popular because of abundance of wind source, savings on valuable real-estate and little impact of wind turbine (WT) noise. Although OWFs are advantageous in many ways, their availability is still not comparable to their onshore coun- terparts. It was found that while the onshore availability is reaching 99 %, the OWFs for the UK at Barrow North, Hoyle, Kentish Flats have availability figures between 67 and 85 % [2]. The downtimes are longer because of the finite weather windows in which personnel can perform the required maintenance. Besides, the maintenance costs are also comparatively higher at the range of 18–23 % of the life cycle costs owing to their location and associated difficulty of maintenance [3]. It is now well accepted that condition monitoring (CM) is important in predicting failures in remotely located WTs both by the wind farm operators and insurance compa- nies [4]. Health monitoring, condition-based maintenance (CBM) and reliability centered maintenance (RCM) are established areas in aerospace sectors and well-proven in energy, oil and gas sectors. Often, these techniques are borrowed in providing a solution in wind energy sec- tor with necessary modifications. It is worthwhile to note that unlike other sectors, equipment in OWFs has to withstand a highly corrosive offshore environment, bad weather conditions like storms and non-stationary operating profiles. Given the understanding about the importance of CM and need for effective maintenance strategies for wind farms, a substantial amount of research has been performed through