Investigation on vibration based CM technique for wind turbine gearbox

Wind energy is a renewable energy that growing fast across the whole world, but its subsystems experience premature failures during its 20-year design life, leading downtime and costly maintain and repair. Since gearbox is the subsystem who causes the longest downtime, condition monitoring (CM) of the gearbox to prevent catastrophic failures is critical to wind energy. Based on vibration analysis, this paper presents a practical CM technique for faulty gear and faulty bearing detection of wind turbine gearbox. The algorithms studied in this paper have been successfully applied on signals from a field test of a full-size wind turbine gearbox who sustained gear and bearing damage, showing a good engineering prospect.