Fault Diagnosis for a Wind Turbine Generator Bearing via Sparse Representation and Shift-Invariant K-SVD

Abstract

It is always a primary challenge in fault diagnosis of a wind turbine generator to extract fault character information under strong noise and nonstationary condition. As a novel signal processing method, sparse representation shows excellent performance in time–frequency analysis and feature extraction. However, its result is directly influenced by dictionary, whose atoms should be as similar with signal's inner structure as possible. Due to the variability of operation environment and physical structure in industrial systems, the patterns of impulse signals are changing over time, which makes creating a proper dictionary even harder. To solve the problem, a novel data-driven fault diagnosis method based on sparse representation and shift-invariant dictionary learning is proposed. The impulse signals at different locations with the same characteristic can be represented by only one atom through shift operation. Then, the shift-invariant dictionary is generated by taking all the possible shifts of a few short atoms and, consequently, is more applicable to represent long signals that in the same pattern appear periodically. Based on the learnt shift-invariant dictionary, the coefficients obtained can be sparser, with the extracted impulse signal being closer to the real signal. Finally, the time–frequency representation of the impulse component is obtained with consideration of both the Wigner–Ville distribution of every atom and the corresponding sparse coefficient. The excellent performance of different fault diagnoses in a fault simulator and a wind turbine proves the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Meanwhile, the comparison with the state-of-the-art method is illustrated, which highlights the superiority of the proposed method.