Online health assessment and fault prediction for wind turbine generator

Abstract

A health assessment and fault prediction method for wind turbine generators is proposed in this article. In health assessment module, considering generator status transferring along with environment and wind turbine–self operating, variables under wind turbine normal working are divided into two parameter spaces and recognized, namely operating conditions and status parameters. Then generator health benchmark models based on Gaussian mixture model are established in different operating condition sub-spaces after the data imbalance problem solved. For online health assessment, health deterioration index based on condition recognition models is calculated and a dual-threshold alarm scheme is proposed. When an alarm is raised by degraded health deterioration index, the program could access fault prediction module, where the generator rear bearing temperature trend and fault remaining time can be predicted through weights redistribution and hyper-parameter optimized support vector regression. In experiments, the proposed health assessment and fault prediction was verified in a real wind farm, and results showed this method could assess generator condition accurately and improve special fault prediction performance.