Implementation of condition monitoring and control system for small-scale wind turbines

Abstract

Nowadays, the importance of real time condition monitoring and control for wind turbine (WT) is increasing because WTs are installed on remote site such as mountains and offshore. In this paper, we implement a monitoring and control system for a small-scale wind turbine. The monitoring and control system consists of data collection units, control unit and coordinator. The data collection units collect data from various sensors: temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind direction, wind speed and vibration. And the data collection units transmit sensing data to a coordinator. A ZigBee is used to communicate between a coordinator and data collection units. The coordinator is also communicate with PC and smart device through RS232 and Bluetooth, respectively. The GUI is implemented based on Android and LabVIEW to show the sensing data. The GUI based on LabVIEW can control the wind turbine direction using control unit.