Diagnosis of a rotor imbalance in a wind turbine based on support vector machine

Abstract

Rotor imbalances in wind turbines present safety risks and lead to economic losses, and a method to diagnose rotor imbalances is urgently needed. A diagnostic method for rotor imbalances is proposed in this paper. First, a signal reconstruction method is proposed, and a novel index is used to determine the number of components used in signal decomposition in order to effectively address the interference by noise on the sensor. Second, an entropy calculation method is proposed, and the Gaussian kernel function is used to replace the fuzzy functions. The results indicate significant differences for different types of rotor imbalances. Moreover, it exhibits good noise robustness and a low dependence on the data length. Third, a support vector machine with multiscale kernels is proposed, and kernel functions with various characteristics and scales are combined. It has a well-distributed hyperplane and better classification performance, and it is robust to wind conditions. Finally, the method is tested and verified with varying levels of noise and turbulence. The results demonstrate satisfactory performance because the proposed method can effectively identify rotor imbalances under different noise and wind conditions.