Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbines Based on the Scattering Transform of Vibration Data

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.