Condition monitoring architecture: To reduce total cost of ownership

The lack of widespread adoption of condition monitoring systems (CMS) in wind turbines is due, in part, to the high total cost of ownership. After the initial purchase, there is installation, Information Technology (servers/database/software support) and knowledge creation cost. Knowledge creation refers to the ability of the CMS to provide the operator with actionable information. Presented is a CMS architecture which reduces the total cost of ownership by reducing hardware cost (MEMS based sensor and local processing), reducing IT cost by deploying to a compute cloud, and reducing the cost of knowledge creation by incorporating advanced digital signal processing and decision support algorithms into the CMS application.