Identifying evolving leading edge erosion by tracking clusters of lift coefficients

Abstract

Abstract This work proposes an approach to identify Leading Edge Erosion (LEE) of a wind turbine blade by tracking evolving and emerging clusters of lift coefficients CL time-series signals under uncertain inflow conditions. Most diagnostic techniques today rely on direct visual inspection, image processing, and statistical analysis, e.g. data mining or regression on SCADA output signals. We claim that probabilistic multivariate spatio-temporal techniques could play an eminent role in the diagnostics of LEE specifically leveraging CL time-series signals form multiple sections along the span of the blade. The proposed method extracts clusters’ features based on Variational Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (VBGMM) and tracks their spatial and temporal changes, as well as interpret the evolution of the clusters through prior physics-based assumptions. The parameters of the VBGMM are the mean, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the covariance matrix, and the angle of orientation of the eigenvectors. We show that the distribution of the CL data may not show statistically separable clusters, however, the parameters of the VBGMM clusters fitted to the CL data, allows to discriminate moving clusters primarily due to varying inflow and operating conditions, versus emerging clusters primarily due to evolving severity of the blade LEE.