Physics-based data analysis for wind turbine condition monitoring

This article presents methodologies for improving wind turbine condition monitoring using physics-based data analysis techniques.The unique operating conditions of the wind turbine drivetrain are described,and the complex kinematics of the gearbox is analyzed in detail.The pros and cons of the current wind turbine condition monitoring system(CMS)are evaluated.To improve the wind turbine CMS capability,it is suggested to use linear models with unsteady excitations,instead of using nonlinear and nonstationary process models,when dealing the wind turbine dynamics response model.An analysis is undertaken of the damage excitation mechanisms cause for various components in a gearbox,especially for those associated with lower-speed shafts.Physics(mechanics)-based data analysis methods are presented for different component damage excitation mechanisms.Validation results,using the wind farm and manufacturing floor data,are reported.

Vibration-based synchronous sampling and its application in wind-turbine drive-train-condition monitoring

Utilizing shaft-speed information to analyse vibration signals is an important method for fault diagnosis and condition monitoring of rotating machineries,especially for those running at variable speeds.However,in many cases,shaft-speed information is not always available,for a variety of reasons.Fortunately,in most of the measurements,the shaft-speed information is embedded in the vibration response in many different forms,such as in the format of the fundamental shaft-rotation-frequency response and its harmonics,and the gear-meshing-frequency response and its harmonics,etc.Proper signal processing can be used to extract the shaft instantaneous speed from the measured vibration responses.In existing instantaneous shaft-speed-identification methods,a narrow-bandpass filtering technique is used explicitly or implicitly.In a complex gearbox system,such as that used in a wind turbine,the gear-meshing-response component could be modulated by many other shaft speeds,due to the configuration of the gearbox or due to the existence of component damage.As a result,it is very difficult to isolate a single vibration-response component for instantaneous shaft-speed detection.In this paper,an innovative approach is presented.The instantaneous shaft speed is extracted based on maxima tracking from the vibration-response spectrogram.A numerical integration scheme is employed to obtain the shaft instantaneous phase.Digital-domain synchronous resampling is then applied to the vibration data by using the instantaneous phase information.Due to the nature of noise suppression in the numerical integration,the accuracy of synchronous sampling is greatly improved.This proposed approach demonstrates the feasibility and engineering applicability through a controlled laboratory test case and two field wind-turbine cases.More detailed results and conclusions of this research are presented at the end of this paper.

A portable wind turbine condition monitoring system and its field applications

This article introduces a portable wind turbine condition monitoring system(CMS)and its applications in wind turbine drivetrain damage detection.The portable CMS based on vibration detection and analysis has a long application history in conventional rotating machineries,but it is not widely used in wind turbines.There are several reasons why it is not used,including the labor-and knowledge-intensive requirements for test setup and result interpretation.There are also reasons specific to wind turbines,such as the structural diversity of drivetrains,the uncertainty of operational conditions,and the complexity of the damage mechanism of different parts that make the conventional vibration-based CMS inefficient and not cost-effective.All these factors affect the wide application of the portable system.The portable wind turbine CMS discussed in this article is integrated using advanced vibration measurement and analysis methodology.Fault detection for the acquired acceleration response and high-speed shaft speed signal is carried out by a suite of data analysis techniques specifically designed for a wind turbine gearbox.Using these techniques,damage detection accuracy for all the components inside a gearbox is improved significantly,especially for those related to medium-and low-speed shafts.The new data processing techniques also are briefly described with the developed methodologies verified by three wind turbines with typical low-speed shaft-related component damages.These damage assessments include the low-and medium-speed planetary stage ring gear,the low-speed planetary stage planet gear and damage to the main bearing.