Wind turbine fault blades detection using CWT analysis in low speeds

Abstract

The recent increase of renewable energy sources can be explained due to the necessity to reduce the pollution generated by the usage of oil-derived power supplies. In this sense, aerogenerators are one of the active power supplies most used since they can be rapidly connected or disconnected according the power demand. Since they have some mobile parts that can be damaged, it is important to generate methodologies that can detect damages at the earliest possible stage. While the failures generated by bearings, misalignment or unbalance are widely studied, blade damages are barely analyzed since they are difficult to detect; yet, it should be considered that since blades are constantly moving, any damage might cause either an excessive vibration or inducing an increase current consumption. Considering the aforementioned facts, this work presents a methodology using the continuous wavelet transform for studying this type of failure when the aerogenerator is operating at a low speed.