Wind turbine gearbox condition monitoring using AI-enabled virtual indicators*

Abstract

Abstract At present, the condition monitoring of wind turbine gearbox mostly involves selecting monitoring indicators in advance and establishing normal behavior models based on deep learning. However, single physical monitoring indicator cannot fully characterize the operating status of the wind turbine gearbox. To address the above issues, a wind turbine gearbox condition monitoring method using convolutional neural network (CNN)-long and short term memory network (LSTM)-autoencoder (AE) enabled virtual indicators is proposed in this paper. This method first establishes a cleaning principle to preprocess the data of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and screen out effective SCADA data further. A CNN-LSTM-AE monitoring model was trained using SCADA data during normal operating process, various characteristic parameters of the gearbox are integrated to construct the AI-enabled virtual indicators, and meanwhile warning thresholds was determined based on the probability density distribution of virtual indicators to analyze the operating status of the gearbox. Finally, the proposed method was validated using real SCADA data from two wind turbines in a cooperated wind farm with my group. Compared with a single physical indicator, the virtual indicator enables to detect gearbox early faults 5 d in advance, indicating that the proposed method can effectively alert wind turbine gearbox failures.