A Digital Twin concept for the prescriptive maintenance of protective coating systems on wind turbine structures

2021 ◽  
pp. 0309524X2110605
Author(s):  
Andreas W Momber ◽  
Torben Möller ◽  
Daniel Langenkämper ◽  
Tim W Nattkemper ◽  
Daniel Brün
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Protective Coating ◽  
Image Annotation ◽  
Initial Point ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Surface Protection ◽  
Digital Twin ◽  
Inspection Condition

The application of protective coating systems is the major measure against the corrosion of steel for tower sections of wind turbines. The inspection, condition monitoring and maintenance of protective coating system is a demanding and time-consuming procedure and requires high human effort. The paper introduces for the first time a Digital Twin concept for the condition monitoring and prescriptive maintenance planning for surface protection systems on wind turbine towers. The initial point of the concept is an in-situ Virtual Twin for the generation of reference areas for condition monitoring. The paper describes the integration of an online image annotation and processing tool, a maintenance model, corrosive resistance parameters, structural load parameters, and sensor data into the Digital Twin concept. The prospects of the concept and its practical relevance are shown for tower structures of large onshore wind turbines.

scholarly journals Hardware-in-the-loop simulator of wind turbine emulator using labview

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 971
Author(s):  
Himani Himani ◽  
Navneet Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
Hardware In The Loop ◽  
Data Acquisition Card ◽  
Terminal Voltage ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

<p><span>This paper describes the design and implementation of Hardware in the Loop (HIL) system D.C. motor based wind turbine emulator for the condition monitoring of wind turbines. Operating the HIL system, it is feasible to replicate the actual operative conditions of wind turbines in a laboratory environment. This method simply and cost-effectively allows evaluating the software and hardware controlling the operation of the generator. This system has been implemented in the LabVIEW based programs by using Advantech- USB-4704-AE Data acquisition card. This paper describes all the components of the systems and their operations along with the control strategies of WTE such as Pitch control and MPPT. Experimental results of the developed simulator using the test rig are benchmarked with the previously verified WT test rigs developed at the Durham University and the University of Manchester in the UK by using the generated current spectra of the generator. Electric subassemblies are most vulnerable to damage in practice, generator-winding faults have been introduced and investigated using the terminal voltage. This wind turbine simulator can be analyzed or reconfigured for the condition monitoring without the requirement of actual WT’s.</span></p>

Comparison of Blind Diagnostic Indicators for Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbine Gearbox Bearings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junyu Qi ◽  
Alexandre Mauricio ◽  
Konstantinos Gryllias
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Conditional Entropy ◽  
Approximate Entropy ◽  
Permutation Entropy ◽  
Wind Turbine Gearbox ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Wind Turbine Gearbox Bearings

Abstract Under the pressure of climate change, renewable energy gradually replaces fossil fuels and plays nowadays a significant role in energy production. The O&M costs of wind turbines may easily reach up to 25% of the total leverised cost per kWh produced over the lifetime of the turbine for a new unit. Manufacturers and operators try to reduce O&M by developing new turbine designs and by adopting condition monitoring approaches. One of the most critical assembly of wind turbines is the gearbox. Gearboxes are designed to last till the end of asset's lifetime, according to the IEC 61400-4 standards but a recent study indicated that gearboxes might have to be replaced as early as 6.5 years. A plethora of sensor types and signal processing methodologies have been proposed in order to accurately detect and diagnose the presence of a fault but often the gearbox is equipped with a limited number of sensors and a simple global diagnostic indicator is demanded, being capable to detect globally various faults of different components. The scope of this paper is the application and comparison of a number of blind global diagnostic indicators which are based on Entropy, on Negentropy, on Sparsity and on Statistics. The performance of the indicators is evaluated on a wind turbine data set with two different bearing faults. Among the different diagnostic indicators Permutation entropy, Approximate entropy, Samples entropy, Fuzzy entropy, Conditional entropy and Wiener entropy achieve the best results detecting blindly the two failure events.

scholarly journals Diagnosis of Faulty Wind Turbine Bearings Using Tower Vibration Measurements

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Luigi Garibaldi ◽  
Alessandro Paolo Daga ◽  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Natili
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Novelty Detection ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Vibration Measurements ◽  
Bearing Fault ◽  
Operation Conditions

Condition monitoring of gear-based mechanical systems in non-stationary operation conditions is in general very challenging. This issue is particularly important for wind energy technology because most of the modern wind turbines are geared and gearbox damages account for at least the 20% of their unavailability time. In this work, a new method for the diagnosis of drive-train bearings damages is proposed: the general idea is that vibrations are measured at the tower instead of at the gearbox. This implies that measurements can be performed without impacting the wind turbine operation. The test case considered in this work is a wind farm owned by the Renvico company, featuring six wind turbines with 2 MW of rated power each. A measurement campaign has been conducted in winter 2019 and vibration measurements have been acquired at five wind turbines in the farm. The rationale for this choice is that, when the measurements have been acquired, three wind turbines were healthy, one wind turbine had recently recovered from a planetary bearing fault, and one wind turbine was undergoing a high speed shaft bearing fault. The healthy wind turbines are selected as references and the damaged and recovered are selected as targets: vibration measurements are processed through a multivariate Novelty Detection algorithm in the feature space, with the objective of distinguishing the target wind turbines with respect to the reference ones. The application of this algorithm is justified by univariate statistical tests on the selected time-domain features and by a visual inspection of the data set via Principal Component Analysis. Finally, a novelty index based on the Mahalanobis distance is used to detect the anomalous conditions at the damaged wind turbine. The main result of the study is that the statistical novelty of the damaged wind turbine data set arises clearly, and this supports that the proposed measurement and processing methods are promising for wind turbine condition monitoring.

scholarly journals Machine Learning for Long Cycle Maintenance Prediction of Wind Turbine

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 1671 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia-Hung Yeh ◽  
Min-Hui Lin ◽  
Chien-Hung Lin ◽  
Cheng-En Yu ◽  
Mei-Juan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Hybrid Network ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Long Cycle ◽  
Power Company ◽  
Maintenance Time

Within Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, the challenge is how to dig out the potentially valuable information from the collected data to support decision making. This paper proposes a method based on machine learning to predict long cycle maintenance time of wind turbines for efficient management in the power company. Long cycle maintenance time prediction makes the power company operate wind turbines as cost-effectively as possible to maximize the profit. Sensor data including operation data, maintenance time data, and event codes are collected from 31 wind turbines in two wind farms. Data aggregation is performed to filter out some errors and get significant information from the data. Then, the hybrid network is built to train the predictive model based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) and support vector machine (SVM). The experimental results show that the prediction of the proposed method reaches high accuracy, which helps drive up the efficiency of wind turbine maintenance.

How to Improve the Reliability of Wind Turbines

2011 ◽  
Vol 58-60 ◽  
pp. 771-775
Author(s):  
Hai Bo Zhang ◽  
Liang Liu
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Monitoring System ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Lubrication System ◽  
Component Failure ◽  
Time Condition ◽  
Automatic Lubrication ◽  
Potential Component ◽  
Condition Monitoring System

According to the failure of wind turbines in operation, the failure cause and phenomenon of wind turbines is analyzed, combined with the reliability of wind turbine subsystems, measures aiming at cooperation parts and purchased parts are proposed, the reliability of the whole wind turbines is improved in a certain extent. At the same time, condition monitoring system can carry through the early detecting and diagnosing to potential component failure maintain. Besides, automatic lubrication system can realize accurate and timeliness lubrication, also can reduce maintenance workload, preserve correct lubrication and smooth running of all parts.

scholarly journals Remote data acquisition for condition monitoring of wind turbines

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Bavo De Maré ◽  
Jacob Sukumaran ◽  
Mia Loccufier ◽  
Patrick De Baets
Keyword(s):  
Data Acquisition ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Good Condition ◽  
Offshore Wind ◽  
Monitoring Systems ◽  
Offshore Wind Turbines ◽  
Condition Monitoring Systems ◽  
Remote Data

While the number of offshore wind turbines is growing and turbines getting bigger and more expensive, the need for good condition monitoring systems is rising. From the research it is clear that failures of the gearbox, and in particular the gearwheels and bearings of the gearbox, have been responsible for the most downtime of a wind turbine. Gearwheels and bearings are being simulated in a multi-sensor environment to observe the wear on the surface.

Comparison of Blind Diagnostic Indicators for Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbine Gearbox Bearings

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junyu Qi ◽  
Alexandre Mauricio ◽  
Konstantinos Gryllias
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Conditional Entropy ◽  
Approximate Entropy ◽  
Fuzzy Entropy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Permutation Entropy ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Acceleration Sensors

Abstract Under the pressure of climate change, renewable energy gradually replaces fossil fuels and plays nowadays a significant role in energy production. Among different types of energy sources, wind power covered 14% of the EU’s electricity demand in 2018. The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs of wind turbines may easily reach up to 20–25% of the total leverised cost per kWh produced over the lifetime of the turbine for a new unit. According to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables (WMPR) onshore wind farm operators are expected to spend nearly $15 billion on O&M services in 2019. Manufacturers and operators try to reduce O&M on one hand by developing new turbine designs and on the other hand by adopting condition monitoring approaches. One of the most critical and rather complex assembly of wind turbines is the gearbox. Gearboxes are designed to last till the end of asset’s lifetime, according to the IEC 61400-4 standards. On the other hand, a recent study over approximately 350 offshore wind turbines indicated that gearboxes might have to be replaced as early as 6.5 years. Therefore a plethora of sensor types and signal processing methodologies have been proposed in order to accurately detect and diagnose the presence of a fault. Among others, Envelope Analysis is one of the most important methodologies, where an envelope of the vibration signal is estimated, usually after filtering around a selected frequency band excited by impacts due to the fault. Sometimes the gearbox is equipped with many acceleration sensors and its kinematics is clearly known. In these cases Cyclostationary Analysis and the corresponding methodologies, i.e. the Cyclic Spectral Correlation and the Cyclic Spectral Coherence, have been proposed as powerful tools. On the other hand often the gearbox is equipped with a limited number of sensors and a simple global diagnostic indicator is demanded, being capable to detect globally various faults of different components. The scope of this paper is the application and comparison of a number of blind global diagnostic indicators which are based on Entropy (Permutation entropy, Approximate entropy, Samples entropy, Fuzzy entropy, Conditional entropy and Wiener entropy), on Negentropy (Infogram), on Sparsity (Sparse-L2/L1, Sparse-L1/L0, Sparse-Gini index) and on Statistics (Mean, Standard deviation, Kurtosis, etc.). The performance of the indicators is evaluated and compared on a wind turbine data set, consisted of vibration data captured by one accelerometer mounted on six 2.5 MW wind turbines, located in a wind park in northern Sweden, where two different bearing faults have been filed, for one wind turbine, during a period of 46 months. Among the different diagnostic indicators Permutation entropy, Approximate entropy, Samples entropy, Fuzzy entropy, Conditional entropy and Wiener entropy achieve the best results detecting blindly the two failure events.

scholarly journals Unsupervised transfer learning for condition monitoring of a fleet of wind turbines

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dandan Peng ◽  
Chenyu Liu ◽  
Wim Desmet ◽  
Konstantinos Gryllias
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Health Status ◽  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Wind Turbines ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Generative Adversarial Networks ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
Scada Systems

The condition monitoring and health status prediction of a fleet of wind turbines are essential for the safety of wind turbines. At present, the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system has been widely used in wind turbines, which can monitor and collect various physical information and sensor information of wind turbines in real-time. Due to the fact that the amount of data obtained by SCADA systems is extremely large, developing an intelligent decision-making system based on deep learning is a very valuable research. Therefore, this paper is committed to exploring a health status prediction algorithm of wind turbines based on deep learning and SCADA systems. However, yet in actual industrial applications, it is very time-consuming and expensive to obtain a large amount of labeled data. In addition, as failures rarely occur, there is a serious sample imbalance problem in the datasets. More importantly, due to the difference in working environment and physical parameters, there are significant differences in the feature distribution of different wind turbines data, which lead to a significant drop in the performance of the deep learning model on unknown wind turbines. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised transfer learning algorithm based on Generative Adversarial Networks for wind turbine health status prediction (WT-GAN). WT-GAN can not only remove the domain shift between wind turbines, but also it is an unsupervised learning method. This practically means that only the unlabeled data for the target domain is required, which solves the problem of labeling data. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of WT-GAN on the condition monitoring of a fleet of wind turbines, we apply this method to one dataset about blade icing detection of wind turbines. The experimental results prove that the proposed method can predict the health of the wind turbine well. In addition, it can significantly reduce the domain shift among different wind turbines, thereby achieving excellent performance on unknown wind turbines.

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