Development of a test bench dedicated to condition monitoring of wind turbines

Online condition monitoring is a crucial task for wind turbine generators availability and reliability enhancement and leads to an early electrical and mechanical faults detection which can reduce the maintenance cost and avoids catastrophic failures. The performance of any condition monitoring system should be evaluated before its installation on an actual full-scale system. Therefore, the design of a reduced-scale wind turbine generator including its main subsystem components at initial stage is important for the assessment of new methods dedicated to electrical and mechanical faults prediction and detection in wind turbine generators. This paper aims to develop a test bench to accomplish this goal. A doubly-fed wound rotor induction generator configuration is selected since it is the dominate technology currently used in the market. The system includes required instrumentations as well as a real-time platform for development of any sophisticated condition monitoring strategy devoted to online condition monitoring of main parts of a wind turbine generator.