The Design of a Holistic IoT-Based Monitoring System for a Wind Turbine

Abstract

As one of the most promising renewable energy resources, a large amount of wind energy has been implemented all around the world since 1990s. Increasing the size of the wind turbines and the harsh operating environment lead to higher failure rates on the wind turbines compared with other renewable resources. As the result, not only unplanned maintenance and repairments but also downtime of the wind turbine increases the operation cost significantly. In addition, the long-distance transmission lines are required to transfer the wind generation power to the load centers due to the remote operation location of the wind farms. To improve the power transfer capability, series compensated lines are adopted in many cases. However, subsynchronous control interactions (SSCI) could happen between series compensated transmission lines and wind turbines. This may damage wind turbine components severely and cause stability issues in the power grids. Currently, various condition monitoring systems have been developed and applied for wind turbines. Different SSCI detection mechanisms are also proposed in many studies. This paper proposes an FPGA-CPU based holistic monitoring system which not only provides both condition and SSCI monitoring functions simultaneously in real-time but also records necessary data for post-event analysis.