Preventive maintenance of wind turbines using Remote Instrument Monitoring System

Effective and efficient usage of renewable energies like Wind, Solar, Hydro and Tidal power should be the vital issue of the decade to meet the current energy requirements, not to speak of the growing energy demand. Wind power, of late has been the focus to offset the power crisis faced due to shortages in the grid. However, the challenges faced during the operation and maintenance (O&M) of wind farms with number of wind turbines scattered and positioned in remote areas has been very difficult for a quick access and is also expensive. In this paper, I propose Remote Instrument Monitoring System (RIMS) which constitutes of a wireless sensor network based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, with the multiple sets of sensors distributed wide across each turbine in the wind farms. This not only helps monitoring the health of the turbines but also helps to take preventive action before critical & catastrophic failures take place.