Wind turbine gearbox condition monitoring through a multi-scale data-driven approach
Abstract
Since wind is expected to play a crucial role on the worldwide electricity production scenario, the reliability
of the turbines is attracting attention from industry as well from the scientific community. New techniques for
efficient condition monitoring of the key components can be fundamental in order to optimize the performance
and the maintenance of a large fleet of turbines. The gearbox and bearings represent the most critical mechan-
ical components, as they are responsible for a large part of the wind turbine downtime during its overall life.
Anyway, monitoring for wind turbine gears is challenging due to the non-stationarity of the operation and the
lack of noise-free vibration measurements. In the present work, a new approach for long to short term efficient
monitoring of wind turbine drivetrains has been developed basing on real-world data. An incipient fault on the
drivetrain of a turbine has been used as a test case for developing a new approach based on the use of multi-
scale data sources. On one side SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) data have been used
for a general monitoring of the state of the machine’s component on long to medium term time-scales, high
multi-resolution data from triggered events collected by a CMS (Condition Monitoring System) were tested to
refine the diagnosis and prognosis of the fault on a shorter scale. Even if triggered spots events are very difficult
to be used when classifying a target machine with a healthy reference one, the results demonstrate that the use
of CMS multi-scale high resolution data can be quick and useful in the fault diagnosis. In the present work,
the one class-SVM (Support Vector Method) was used for novelty detection. The approach, when applied to
all the available time scales, is able to detect the incoming fault also several years in advance and can therefore
be proposed as quick detection approach requiring less data with respect to the classical data-driven regression
normal behaviour model developed with continuously available SCADA data.
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