Monitoring of Wind Turbines: A Bio-Inspired Fault Tolerant Approach

Abstract

With increasing capacity and offshore application of wind turbines the on-line monitoring module plays a vital role in maintaining safe, reliable and cost-effective operation of wind conversion systems. In this work a novel monitoring structure for large-scale wind turbines is introduced and analyzed. The salient features of the proposed monitoring structure lie in three aspects. First, a double-sensor structure with individual pitch control module is adopted to ensure more reliable pitch load distribution and data acquisition. Second, a bio-inspired data process method with state estimation and prediction module is introduced to pre-process the large amount of data from various sensors, so as to improve the data utilization efficiency of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. Third, a fault tolerant scheme with switched control strategies is used for different modes, and thus optimizes the wind turbine operation performance. Numerical simulations demonstrate the data process flow briefly.