I suppose there are mathematical equations to model an indicator of a wind turbine applicable to estimate its state of the health or life span. By my guess, this indicator can be related to the variables such as the thrust applied to the tower, different vibrations and so on. Can you recommend useful references?
Are you only looking for operational costs? In any case, a very good starting point for wind turbine costs is:
"Wind Turbine Design Cost and Scaling Model" from NREL
http://www.nrel.gov/wind/pdfs/40566.pdf
Matt Hall: Thank you for your response. What I am looking for is the state of the health or life span calculation. It means that I need to calculate an indicator illustrating the effects of the different operation variables on the turbine life span. These parameters can be the thrust on the tower, vibration, and so on.
A good source for calculation is the Canadian Retscreen International www.retscreen.net
Arash: It sounds to me like you need to calculate the fatigue loads on the turbine components (from which you can calculate its fatigue life, etc. What level of detail (in terms of environmental inputs, turbine modelling fidelity, and output data) are you considering? You mentioned thrust and vibration, which to me suggests a medium level of fidelity, where you're interested in the unsteady forces on the blades, effects of wind turbulence, etc.
If that is the case, one of the industry standards for time-domain wind turbine simulation is NREL's FAST. See http://wind.nrel.gov/designcodes/simulators/fast/ . It is open source and there is a lot of information about it published online. If you use it, you could use the Matlab code MCrunch to calculate fatigue data from the results, and you might find helpful info on the NREL NWTC Forum.
I'd check out Sjoerd's suggestion first, because if you don't need very much detail, RETScreen is a much more practical and user-friendly tool!
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