LSTM-Autoencoder Based Anomaly Detection Using Vibration Data of Wind Turbines

Abstract

The problem of energy depletion has brought wind energy under consideration to replace oil- or chemical-based energy. However, the breakdown of wind turbines is a major concern. Accordingly, unsupervised learning was performed using the vibration signal of a wind power generator to achieve an outlier detection performance of 97%. We analyzed the vibration data through wavelet packet conversion and identified a specific frequency band that showed a large difference between the normal and abnormal data. To emphasize these specific frequency bands, high-pass filters were applied to maximize the difference. Subsequently, the dimensions of the data were reduced through principal component analysis, giving unique characteristics to the data preprocessing process. Normal data collected from a wind farm located in northern Sweden was first preprocessed and trained using a long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder to perform outlier detection. The LSTM Autoencoder is a model specialized for time-series data that learns the patterns of normal data and detects other data as outliers. Therefore, we propose a method for outlier detection through data preprocessing and unsupervised learning, utilizing the vibration signals from wind generators. This will facilitate the quick and accurate detection of wind power generator failures and provide alternatives to the problem of energy depletion.