Condition monitoring of wind turbines based on amplitude demodulation

Wind energy conversion systems (WECS) have become a focal point in the research of renewable energy sources. In order to make wind turbine reliable and competitive, it is important to reduce the operational and maintenance costs. The most efficient way to reduce it relies on condition monitoring and fault diagnostics. This paper proposes a new fault detector based on the amplitude demodulation of the three-phase stator current. Simulations show that this low-complexity method is well suited for stationary or non-stationary behavior.