Compressive Sensing-Based Missing-Data-Tolerant Fault Detection for Remote Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbines

Abstract

Compared with traditional onsite wind turbine condition monitoring systems (CMSs), the remote CMSs can use better computational resources to process data with more advanced algorithms and, thus, can provide more advanced condition monitoring capabilities, but may suffer from a data loss problem, especially when wireless data transmission is used. To solve this problem, this article proposes a compressive sensing-based missing-data-tolerant fault detection method for remote condition monitoring of wind turbines. First, the condition monitoring signals collected from wind turbines are conditioned to increase their sparsity. Then, a compressive-sensing-based sampling algorithm is designed to sample the conditioned signals. The resulting data samples, called measurements of the conditioned signals are transmitted wirelessly during which some data samples are possibly lost. At the data receiving end, the conditioned signals are reconstructed from the received data samples, which might be incomplete, via a compressive-sensing-based signal reconstruction algorithm. Finally, spectrum analysis is performed on the reconstructed signals for wind turbine fault detection via fault characteristic frequency identification. The proposed method is validated for bearing fault detection of a Skystream 3.7 wind turbine and an Air Breeze wind turbine by using the data of a generator current signal collected from each wind turbine remotely while considering different data loss rates.