A novel multi-information fusion grey model and its application in wear trend prediction of wind turbines

Abstract

• Multi-information is introduced into a grey prediction model to replace the traditional single source information. • The robustness of a grey prediction model is highlighted. • The model's properties are investigated through systematic numerical simulations and case studies in wear trend prediction. • The result exhibits that the inclusion of multi-information can improve the accuracy and robustness of grey predictions. The small and fluctuating samples of lubricating oil data render the wear trend prediction a challenging task in operation and maintenance management of wind turbine gearboxes. To deal with this problem, this paper puts forward a method to enhance the prediction accuracy and robustness of the grey prediction model by introducing multi-source information into traditional grey models. Multi-source information is applied by creating a mapping sequence according to the sequence to be predicted. The significance of the key parameters in the proposed model was investigated by numerical experiments. Based on the results from the numerical experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated using lubricating oil data captured from industrial wind turbine gearboxes. A comparative analysis was also conducted with a number of selected other models to illustrate the superiority of the proposed model in dealing with small and fluctuating data. Prediction results show that the proposed model is able to relax the quasi-smooth requirement of data sequence and is much more robust in comparison to exponential regression, linear regression and non-equidistance GM(1,1) models.