False Alarms Analysis of Wind Turbine Bearing System

Abstract

Wind turbines are complex systems that use advanced condition monitoring systems for analyzing their health status. The gearbox is one of the most critical components due to its elevated downtime and failure rate. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems are employed in wind farms for condition monitoring and control in real time. The volume and variety of the data require novel and robust techniques for data analysis. The main novelty of this work is the development of a new modelling of the temperature curve of the gearbox bearing versus wind speed to detect false alarms. An approach based on data partitioning and data mining centers is employed. The wind speed range is divided into intervals to increase the accuracy of the model, where the centers are considered representative samples in the modelling. A method based on the alarm detection is developed and studied together with the alarms report provided by a real case study. The results obtained allow the identification of critical alarm periods outside the confidence interval. It is validated that the study of alarm identification, pre-filtered data, state variable, and output power contribute to the detection of the false alarms.