Real-Time Electrostatic Monitoring of Wear Debris for Wind Turbine Gearbox

Engineering practice has shown that early faults of gearboxes are a leading maintenance cost driver that can easily lower the profit from a wind turbine operation.A novel oil-lubricated electrostatic monitoring of wear debris for a wind turbine gearbox is presented.The continuous wavelet transform(CWT)is used to eliminate the noises of the original electrostatic signal.The kurtosis and root mean square(RMS)values of the time domain signal are extracted as the characteristic parameters to reflect the deterioration of the gearbox.The overall tendency of electrostatic signals in accelerated life test is analyzed.In the eighth cycle,the abnormal wear in the wind turbine gearbox is detected by electrostatic monitoring.A comparison with the popular MetalScan monitoring is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the electrostatic monitoring method.The results demonstrate that the electrostatic monitoring method can detect the fault accurately.

Reliability Analysis of Wind Turbine Gearbox Based on the Optimal Confidence Limit Method

Based on the zero-failure data of 30 Chinese 1. 5 MW wind turbine gearboxes( WTGs),the optimal confidence limit method was developed to predict the reliability and reliability lifetime of WTG. Firstly,Bayesian method and classical probability estimation method were introduced to estimate the value interval of shape parameter considering the engineering practice. Secondly,taking this value interval into the optimal confidence limit method,the reliability and reliability lifetime of WTG could be obtained under different confidence levels. Finally,the results of optimal confidence limit method and Bayesian method were compared. And the comparison results show that the rationality of this estimated range.Meantime, the rule of confidence level selection in the optimal confidence limit method is provided, and the reliability and reliability lifetime prediction of WTG can be acquired.

Wind Turbine Gearbox Fault Diagnosis Based on Multi-sensor Signals Fusion

This paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis method by fusing the information from multi-sensor signals to improve the reliability of the conventional vibration-based wind turbine drivetrain gearbox fault diagnosis methods.The method fully extracts fault features for variable speed,insufficient samples,and strong noise scenarios that may occur in the actual operation of a wind turbine planetary gearbox.First,multiple sensor signals are added to the diagnostic model,and multiple stacked denoising auto-encoders are designed and improved to extract the fault information.Then,a cycle reservoir with regular jumps is introduced to fuse multidimensional fault information and output diagnostic results in response to the insufficient ability to process fused information by the conventional Softmax classifier.In addition,the competitive swarm optimizer algorithm is introduced to address the challenge of obtaining the optimal combination of parameters in the network.Finally,the validation results show that the proposed method can increase fault diagnostic accuracy and improve robustness.

Multi-objective genetic algorithms based structural optimization and experimental investigation of the planet carrier in wind turbine gearbox

To improve the dynamic performance and reduce the weight of the planet carrier in wind turbine gearbox, a multi-objective optimization method, which is driven by the maximum deformation, the maximum stress and the minimum mass of the studied part, is proposed by combining the response surface method and genetic algorithms in this paper. Firstly, the design points＇ distribution for the design variables of the planet carrier is established with the central composite design （CCD） method. Then, based on the computing results of finite element analysis （FEA）, the response surface analysis is conducted to find out the proper sets of design variable values. And a multi-objective genetic algorithm （MOGA） is applied to determine the direction of optimization. As well, this method is applied to design and optimize the planet carrier in a 1.5 MW wind turbine gearbox, the results of which are validated by an experimental modal test. Compared with the original design, the mass and the stress of the optimized planet carrier are respectively reduced by 9.3% and 40%. Consequently, the cost of planet carrier is greatly reduced and its stability is also improved.

Reliability Copula Model for Wind Turbine Gearbox Based on Failure Correlation

On the basis of each gear's failure correlation, the reliability Copula model of a wind turbine gearbox is established and a 1.5 MW wind turbine gearbox is taken as the research object. Firstly, based on the dynamic reliability model of mechanical parts, each gear's life distribution function of a wind turbine gearbox is obtained.The life distribution function can be used as the marginal distributions of the system's joint distribution. Secondly,Copula function is introduced to describe the failure correlation between parts, and the appropriate Copula function is selected according to the shape characters of Copula probability density function. Finally, the wind turbine gearbox system is divided into three parts according to the failure correlation of each gear. The Sklar theorem and the thought of step by step analysis are used to obtain the reliability Copula model for a wind turbine gearbox based on failure correlation.

Weak characteristic information extraction from early fault of wind turbine generator gearboxKeywords wind turbine generator gearbox, B-singular value decomposition, local mean decomposition, weak characteristic information extraction, early fault warning

Given the weak early degradation characteristic information during early fault evolution in gearbox of wind turbine generator, traditional singular value decomposition （SVD）-based denoising may result in loss of useful information. A weak characteristic information extraction based on μ-SVD and local mean decomposition （LMD） is developed to address this problem. The basic principle of the method is as follows： Determine the denoising order based on cumulative contribution rate, perform signal reconstruction, extract and subject the noisy part of signal to LMD and μ-SVD denoising, and obtain denoised signal through superposition. Experimental results show that this method can significantly weaken signal noise, effectively extract the weak characteristic information of early fault, and facilitate the early fault warning and dynamic predictive maintenance.

A dynamic-model-based fault diagnosis method for a wind turbine planetary gearbox using a deep learning network

The planetary gearbox is a critical part of wind turbines,and has great significance for their safety and reliability.Intelligent fault diagnosis methods for these gearboxes have made some achievements based on the availability of large quantities of labeled data.However,the data collected from the diagnosed devices are always unlabeled,and the acquisition of fault data from real gearboxes is time-consuming and laborious.As some gearbox faults can be conveniently simulated by a relatively precise dynamic model,the data from dynamic simulation containing some features are related to those from the actual machines.As a potential tool,transfer learning adapts a network trained in a source domain to its application in a target domain.Therefore,a novel fault diagnosis method combining transfer learning with dynamic model is proposed to identify the health conditions of planetary gearboxes.In the method,a modified lumped-parameter dynamic model of a planetary gear train is established to simulate the resultant vibration signal,while an optimized deep transfer learning network based on a one-dimensional convolutional neural network is built to extract domain-invariant features from different domains to achieve fault classification.Various groups of transfer diagnosis experiments of planetary gearboxes are carried out,and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the reliability of both the dynamic model and the proposed method.

Multiple fault separation and detection by joint subspace learning for the health assessment of wind turbine gearboxes

The gearbox of a wind turbine （WT） has dominant failure rates and highest downtime loss among all WT subsystems. Thus, gearbox health assessment for maintenance cost reduction is of paramount importance. The concurrence of multiple faults in gearbox components is a common phenomenon due to fault induction mechanism. This problem should be considered before planning to replace the components of the WT gearbox. Therefore, the key fault patterns should be reliably identified from noisy observation data for the development of an effective maintenance strategy. However, most of the existing studies focusing on multiple fault diagnosis always suffer from inappropriate division of fault information in order to satisfy various rigorous decomposition principles or statistical assumptions, such as the smooth envelope principle of ensemble empirical mode decomposition and the mutual independence assumption of independent component analysis. Thus, this paper presents a joint subspace learning-based multiple fault detection （JSLMFD） technique to construct different subspaces adaptively for different fault pattems. Its main advantage is its capability to learn multiple fault subspaces directly from the observation signal itself. It can also sparsely concentrate the feature information into a few dominant subspace coefficients. Furthermore, it can eliminate noise by simply performing coefficient shrinkage operations. Consequently, multiple fault patterns are reliably identified by utilizing the maximum fault information criterion. The superiority of JSL-MFD in multiple fault separation and detection is comprehensively investigated and verified by the analysis of a data set of a 750 kW WT gearbox. Results show that JSL-MFD is superior to a state-of-the-art technique in detecting hidden fault patterns and enhancing detection accuracy.

Effect of friction coefficients on the dynamic response of gear systems

The inevitable deterioration of the lubrication conditions in a gearbox in service can change the tribological properties of the meshing teeth. In turn, such changes can significantly affect the dynamic responses and running status of gear systems. This paper investigates such an effect by utilizing virtual prototype technology to model and simulate the dynamics of a wind turbine gearbox system. The change in the lubrication conditions is modeled by the changes in the friction coefficients, thereby indicating that poor lubrication causes not only increased frictional losses but also significant changes in the dynamic responses. These results are further demon-strated by the mean and root mean square values calculated by the simulated responses under different friction coefficients. In addition, the spectrum exhibits significant changes in the first, second, and third harmonics of the meshing components. The findings and simulation method of this study provide theoretical bases for the development of accurate diagnostic techniques.