Cost-Effective Condition Monitoring for Wind Turbines

Cost-effective wind turbine (WT) condition monitoring assumes more importance as turbine sizes increase and they are placed in more remote locations, for example, offshore. Conventional condition monitoring techniques, such as vibration, lubrication oil, and generator current signal analysis, require the deployment of a variety of sensors and computationally intensive analysis techniques. This paper describes a WT condition monitoring technique that uses the generator output power and rotational speed to derive a fault detection signal. The detection algorithm uses a continuous-wavelet-transform-based adaptive filter to track the energy in the prescribed time-varying fault-related frequency bands in the power signal. The central frequency of the filter is controlled by the generator speed, and the filter bandwidth is adapted to the speed fluctuation. Using this technique, fault features can be extracted, with low calculation times, from direct- or indirect-drive fixed- or variable-speed WTs. The proposed technique has been validated experimentally on a WT drive train test rig. A synchronous or induction generator was successively installed on the test rig, and both mechanical and electrical fault like perturbations were successfully detected when applied to the test rig.