scholarly journals Vibration Analysis for Fault Detection of Wind Turbine Drivetrains—A Comprehensive Investigation

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1686
Author(s):  
Wei Teng ◽  
Xian Ding ◽  
Shiyao Tang ◽  
Jin Xu ◽  
Bingshuai Shi ◽  
...  

Vibration analysis is an effective tool for the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of wind turbine drivetrains. It enables the defect location of mechanical subassemblies and health indicator construction for remaining useful life prediction, which is beneficial to reducing the operation and maintenance costs of wind farms. This paper analyzes the structure features of different drivetrains of mainstream wind turbines and introduces a vibration data acquisition system. Almost all the research on the vibration-based diagnosis algorithm for wind turbines in the past decade is reviewed, with its effects being discussed. Several challenging tasks and their solutions in the vibration-based fault detection of wind turbine drivetrains are proposed from the perspective of practicality for wind turbines, including the fault detection of planetary subassemblies in multistage wind turbine gearboxes, fault feature extraction under nonstationary conditions, fault information enhancement techniques and health indicator construction. Numerous naturally damaged cases representing the real operational features of industrial wind turbines are given, with a discussion of the failure mechanism of defective parts in wind turbine drivetrains as well.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6785
Author(s):  
Francesco Natili ◽  
Alessandro Paolo Daga ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Luigi Garibaldi

Timely damage diagnosis of wind turbine rolling elements is a keystone for improving availability and eventually diminishing the cost of wind energy: from this point of view, it is a priority to integrate high-level practices into the real-world operation and maintenance of wind farms. On this basis, the present study is devoted to the formulation of reliable methodologies for the supervision of wind turbine bearings, which possibly can be integrated in the industrial practice. For this reason, this study is a collaboration between a company (ENGIE Italia), the University of Perugia and the Politecnico di Torino. The analysis is based on the exploitation of the data types which are available to wind farm managers from industrial control systems: SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) and TCM (Turbine Condition Monitoring). Due to the intrinsic sampling time difference between SCADA and TCM data (a few minutes the former, up to the millisecond for the latter), the proposed methodology is designed as multi-scale. At first, historical SCADA data are processed and the behavior of the oil filter pressure is analyzed for all the wind turbines in the farm: this provides preliminary advice for identifying presumably healthy wind turbines from those suspected of damage. A second step for the SCADA analysis is then represented by the study of the temperature trends of the bearings through a Support Vector Regression: the incoming damage is individuated from the analysis of the mismatch between measurements and estimates provided by the normal behavior model. Finally, the healthy units are selected as the reference and the faulty as the target for the analysis of TCM vibration data in the time domain: statistical features are computed on independent chunks of the signals and, using a Novelty Index, it was possible to distinguish the damaged wind turbines with respect to the reference ones. In light of the interest in application of the proposed methodology, good practice criteria in selecting and managing the data are discussed as well.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 982 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wu ◽  
Hong Wang ◽  
Guoqian Jiang ◽  
Ping Xie ◽  
Xiaoli Li

Health monitoring of wind turbine gearboxes has gained considerable attention as wind turbines become larger in size and move to more inaccessible locations. To improve the reliability, extend the lifetime of the turbines, and reduce the operation and maintenance cost caused by the gearbox faults, data-driven condition motoring techniques have been widely investigated, where various sensor monitoring data (such as power, temperature, and pressure, etc.) have been modeled and analyzed. However, wind turbines often work in complex and dynamic operating conditions, such as variable speeds and loads, thus the traditional static monitoring method relying on a certain fixed threshold will lead to unsatisfactory monitoring performance, typically high false alarms and missed detections. To address this issue, this paper proposes a reliable monitoring model for wind turbine gearboxes based on echo state network (ESN) modeling and the dynamic threshold scheme, with a focus on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) vibration data. The aim of the proposed approach is to build the turbine normal behavior model only using normal SCADA vibration data, and then to analyze the unseen SCADA vibration data to detect potential faults based on the model residual evaluation and the dynamic threshold setting. To better capture temporal information inherent in monitored sensor data, the echo state network (ESN) is used to model the complex vibration data due to its simple and fast training ability and powerful learning capability. Additionally, a dynamic threshold monitoring scheme with a sliding window technique is designed to determine dynamic control limits to address the issue of the low detection accuracy and poor adaptability caused by the traditional static monitoring methods. The effectiveness of the proposed monitoring method is verified using the collected SCADA vibration data from a wind farm located at Inner Mongolia in China. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve improved detection accuracy and reliability compared with the traditional static threshold monitoring method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3333
Author(s):  
Maria del Cisne Feijóo ◽  
Yovana Zambrano ◽  
Yolanda Vidal ◽  
Christian Tutivén

Structural health monitoring for offshore wind turbine foundations is paramount to the further development of offshore fixed wind farms. At present time there are a limited number of foundation designs, the jacket type being the preferred one in large water depths. In this work, a jacket-type foundation damage diagnosis strategy is stated. Normally, most or all the available data are of regular operation, thus methods that focus on the data leading to failures end up using only a small subset of the available data. Furthermore, when there is no historical precedent of a type of fault, those methods cannot be used. In addition, offshore wind turbines work under a wide variety of environmental conditions and regions of operation involving unknown input excitation given by the wind and waves. Taking into account the aforementioned difficulties, the stated strategy in this work is based on an autoencoder neural network model and its contribution is two-fold: (i) the proposed strategy is based only on healthy data, and (ii) it works under different operating and environmental conditions based only on the output vibration data gathered by accelerometer sensors. The proposed strategy has been tested through experimental laboratory tests on a scaled model.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiannis A. Katsigiannis ◽  
George S. Stavrakakis ◽  
Christodoulos Pharconides

This paper examines the effect of different wind turbine classes on the electricity production of wind farms in two areas of Cyprus Island, which present low and medium wind potentials: Xylofagou and Limassol. Wind turbine classes determine the suitability of installing a wind turbine in a particulate site. Wind turbine data from five different manufacturers have been used. For each manufacturer, two wind turbines with identical rated power (in the range of 1.5 MW–3 MW) and different wind turbine classes (IEC II and IEC III) are compared. The results show the superiority of wind turbines that are designed for lower wind speeds (IEC III class) in both locations, in terms of energy production. This improvement is higher for the location with the lower wind potential and starts from 7%, while it can reach more than 50%.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junyu Qi ◽  
Alexandre Mauricio ◽  
Konstantinos Gryllias

Abstract As a renewable, unlimited and free resource, wind energy has been intensively deployed in the past to generate electricity. However, the maintenance of Wind Turbines (WTs) can be challengeable. On the one hand, most wind farms operate in remote areas and on the other hand, the dimension of WTs’ tip/hub/rotor are usually enormous. In order to prevent abrupt breakdowns of WTs, a number of Condition Monitoring (CM) methods have been proposed. Focusing on bearing diagnostics, Squared Envelope Spectrum is one of the most common techniques. Moreover in order to identify the optimum demodulation frequency band, fast Kurtogram, Infogram and Sparsogram are nowadays popular tools evaluating respectively the Kurtosis, the Negentropy and the Sparsity. The analysis of WTs usually requires high effort due to the complexity of the drivetrain and the varying operating conditions and therefore there is still need for research on effective and reliable CM techniques for WT monitoring. Thus the purpose of this paper is to investigate a blind and effective CM approach based on the Scattering Transform. Through the comparison with state of the art techniques, the proposed methodology is found more powerful to detect a fault on six validated WT datasets.


Author(s):  
I. Janajreh ◽  
C. Ghenai

Large scale wind turbines and wind farms continue to evolve mounting 94.1GW of the electrical grid capacity in 2007 and expected to reach 160.0GW in 2010 according to World Wind Energy Association. They commence to play a vital role in the quest for renewable and sustainable energy. They are impressive structures of human responsiveness to, and awareness of, the depleting fossil fuel resources. Early generation wind turbines (windmills) were used as kinetic energy transformers and today generate 1/5 of the Denmark’s electricity and planned to double the current German grid capacity by reaching 12.5% by year 2010. Wind energy is plentiful (72 TW is estimated to be commercially viable) and clean while their intensive capital costs and maintenance fees still bar their widespread deployment in the developing world. Additionally, there are technological challenges in the rotor operating characteristics, fatigue load, and noise in meeting reliability and safety standards. Newer inventions, e.g., downstream wind turbines and flapping rotor blades, are sought to absorb a larger portion of the cost attributable to unrestrained lower cost yaw mechanisms, reduction in the moving parts, and noise reduction thereby reducing maintenance. In this work, numerical analysis of the downstream wind turbine blade is conducted. In particular, the interaction between the tower and the rotor passage is investigated. Circular cross sectional tower and aerofoil shapes are considered in a staggered configuration and under cross-stream motion. The resulting blade static pressure and aerodynamic forces are investigated at different incident wind angles and wind speeds. Comparison of the flow field results against the conventional upstream wind turbine is also conducted. The wind flow is considered to be transient, incompressible, viscous Navier-Stokes and turbulent. The k-ε model is utilized as the turbulence closure. The passage of the rotor blade is governed by ALE and is represented numerically as a sliding mesh against the upstream fixed tower domain. Both the blade and tower cross sections are padded with a boundary layer mesh to accurately capture the viscous forces while several levels of refinement were implemented throughout the domain to assess and avoid the mesh dependence.


Author(s):  
Ibtissem Barkat ◽  
Abdelouahab Benretem ◽  
Fawaz Massouh ◽  
Issam Meghlaoui ◽  
Ahlem Chebel

This article aims to study the forces applied to the rotors of horizontal axis wind turbines. The aerodynamics of a turbine are controlled by the flow around the rotor, or estimate of air charges on the rotor blades under various operating conditions and their relation to the structural dynamics of the rotor are critical for design. One of the major challenges in wind turbine aerodynamics is to predict the forces on the blade as various methods, including blade element moment theory (BEM), the approach that is naturally adapted to the simulation of the aerodynamics of wind turbines and the dynamic and models (CFD) that describes with fidelity the flow around the rotor. In our article we proposed a modeling method and a simulation of the forces applied to the horizontal axis wind rotors turbines using the application of the blade elements method to model the rotor and the vortex method of free wake modeling in order to develop a rotor model, which can be used to study wind farms. This model is intended to speed up the calculation, guaranteeing a good representation of the aerodynamic loads exerted by the wind.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 215-221
Author(s):  
Anna Kuwana ◽  
Xue Yan Bai ◽  
Dan Yao ◽  
Haruo Kobayashi

There are many types of wind turbine. Large propeller-type wind turbines are used mainly for large wind farms and offshore wind power generation. Small vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are often used in distributed energy systems. In previous studies on wind turbines, the basic characteristics such as torque coefficient have often been obtained during rotation, with the turbine rotating at a constant speed. Such studies are necessary for the proper design of wind turbines. However, it is also necessary to conduct research under conditions in which the wind direction and wind speed change over time. Numerical simulation of the starting characteristics is carried out in this study. Based on the flow field around the wind turbine, the force required to rotate the turbine is calculated. The force used to stop the turbine is modeled based on friction in relation to the bearing. Equations for the motion of the turbine are solved by their use as external force. Wind turbine operation from the stationary state to the start of rotation is simulated. Five parameters, namely, blade length, wind turbine radius, overlap, gap, and blade thickness, are changed and the optimum shape is obtained. The simulation results tend to qualitatively agree with the experimental results for steadily rotating wind turbines in terms of two aspects: (1) the optimal shape has an 20% overlap of the turbine radius, and (2) the larger the gap, the lower the efficiency.


Author(s):  
Roozbeh Bakhshi ◽  
Peter Sandborn

With renewable energy and wind energy in particular becoming mainstream means of energy production, the reliability aspect of wind turbines and their sub-assemblies has become a topic of interest for owners and manufacturers of wind turbines. Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs account for more than 25% of total costs of onshore wind projects and these costs are even higher for offshore installations. Effective management of O&M costs depends on accurate failure prediction for turbine sub-assemblies. There are numerous models that predict failure times and O&M costs of wind farms. All these models have inputs in the form of reliability parameters. These parameters are usually generated by researchers using field failure data. There are several databases that report the failure data of operating wind turbines and researches use these failure data to generate the reliability parameters through various methods of statistical analysis. However, in order to perform the statistical analysis or use the results of the analysis, one must understand the underlying assumptions of the database along with information about the wind turbine population in the database such as their power rating, age, etc. In this work, we analyze the relevant assumptions and discuss what information is required from a database in order to improve the statistical analysis on wind turbines’ failure data.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyan Ding ◽  
Zuntao Feng ◽  
Puyang Zhang ◽  
Conghuan Le ◽  
Yaohua Guo

The composite bucket foundation (CBF) for offshore wind turbines is the basis for a one-step integrated transportation and installation technique, which can be adapted to the construction and development needs of offshore wind farms due to its special structural form. To transport and install bucket foundations together with the upper portion of offshore wind turbines, a non-self-propelled integrated transportation and installation vessel was designed. In this paper, as the first stage of applying the proposed one-step integrated construction technique, the floating behavior during the transportation of CBF with a wind turbine tower for the Xiangshui wind farm in the Jiangsu province was monitored. The influences of speed, wave height, and wind on the floating behavior of the structure were studied. The results show that the roll and pitch angles remain close to level during the process of lifting and towing the wind turbine structure. In addition, the safety of the aircushion structure of the CBF was verified by analyzing the measurement results for the interaction force and the depth of the liquid within the bucket. The results of the three-DOF (degree of freedom) acceleration monitoring on the top of the test tower indicate that the wind turbine could meet the specified acceleration value limits during towing.


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