Bearing fault detection and diagnosis of a wind turbine

The most commonly used components in a wind turbine are bearings which failure could lead to malfunction and ultimately complete stall of a mission-critical equipment. Hence, bearing Fault Detection is an imperative part of preventive maintenance procedures of a wind turbine. This paper presents a Free Parameter method to implement bearing fault diagnosis. This method extracts the amplitude and frequency modulations of the vibration signals that measure from a wind turbine system. As the amplitude demodulation is inherent in it, the fault frequency will be detected from the spectrum of the signal. Simulated signal and experimental data has validated the effectiveness of this method.