Wind Turbine Gearbox Fault Detection Based on Multifractal Analysis

Abstract

The presence of irregularity in periodical vibration signals usually indicates the occurrence of wind turbine gearbox faults. Unfortunately, detecting the incipient faults is a difficult job because they are rather weak and often interfered by heavy noise and higher level macro-structural vibrations. Therefore, a proper signal processing method is necessary. We used the wavelet-based multifractal method to extract the impulsive features buried in noisy vibration signals. We first calculated the wavelet transform modulo maxima lines from the real vibration signals, then, obtained the singularity spectrum from the lines. The analysis results of the real signals showed that the proposed method can effectively extract weak fault features.