Wind Turbine Main Bearing Fault Prognosis Based Solely on SCADA Data.

Ángel Encalada-Dávila,Bryan Puruncajas,Christian Tutivén,Yolanda Vidal

doi:10.3390/s21062228

Abstract

As stated by the European Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE), the wind industry has identified main bearing failures as a critical issue in terms of increasing wind turbine reliability and availability. This is owing to major repairs with high replacement costs and long downtime periods associated with main bearing failures. Thus, the main bearing fault prognosis has become an economically relevant topic and is a technical challenge. In this work, a data-based methodology for fault prognosis is presented. The main contributions of this work are as follows: (i) Prognosis is achieved by using only supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data, which is already available in all industrial-sized wind turbines; thus, no extra sensors that are designed for a specific purpose need to be installed. (ii) The proposed method only requires healthy data to be collected; thus, it can be applied to any wind farm even when no faulty data has been recorded. (iii) The proposed algorithm works under different and varying operating and environmental conditions. (iv) The validity and performance of the established methodology is demonstrated on a real underproduction wind farm consisting of 12 wind turbines. The obtained results show that advanced prognostic systems based solely on SCADA data can predict failures several months prior to their occurrence and allow wind turbine operators to plan their operations.

Highlights

IntroductionThe challenge of obtaining energy while minimizing costs, and pollution is a matter of concern owing to climate change and global warming, as well as the need to democratize the extraction of energy worldwide
Energy is a key pillar of human evolution
The stated strategy works under different operating and environmental conditions to which wind turbines (WTs) are subject

Summary

Introduction

The challenge of obtaining energy while minimizing costs, and pollution is a matter of concern owing to climate change and global warming, as well as the need to democratize the extraction of energy worldwide. In this regard, renewable energy, i.e., energy collected from renewable resources, is an excellent option, as they are clean and exist over a wide geographical area, unlike fossil-fuel energy sources, which are air pollutants and are concentrated in a limited number of countries. In 2019, wind energy generated enough electricity to meet 15% of Europe’s electricity demand [1] and was the leading source of new capacity in Europe, the. Unleashing the massive potential of wind energy is crucial for reducing the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) [2]

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