A two-stage fault detection and classification for electric pitch drives in offshore wind farms using support vector machine

Abstract

This article presents a two-stage fault detection and classification scheme, for induction motor drives in wind turbine pitch systems. The presented approach is suitable for application in offshore wind farms. The adopted strategy utilizes three phase motor current sensing at the pitch drives for fault detection and only when a fault is detected at this stage, features extracted from the current signals are transmitted to a central support vector machine classifier. The proposed method is validated in a laboratory setup of the pitch drive.