DNN‐based approach for fault detection in a direct drive wind turbine

Abstract

Incipient fault detection of wind turbines is beneficial for making maintenance strategy and avoiding catastrophic result in a wind farm. A deep neural network (DNN)-based approach is proposed to deal with the challenging task for a direct drive wind turbine, involving four steps: a preprocessing method considering operational mechanism is presented to get rid of the outliers in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA); the conventional random forest method is used to evaluate the importance of variables related to the target variable; the historical healthy SCADA data excluding outliers is used to train a deep neural network; and the exponentially weighted moving average control chart is adopted to determine the fault threshold. With the online data being input into the trained deep neural network model of a wind turbine with healthy state, the testing error is regarded as the metric of fault alarm of the wind turbine. The proposed approach is successfully applied to the fault detection of the fall off of permanent magnets in a direct drive wind turbine generator.