scholarly journals SCADA Data Analysis Methods for Diagnosis of Electrical Faults to Wind Turbine Generators

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3307
Author(s):  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Natili

The electric generator is estimated to be among the top three contributors to the failure rates and downtime of wind turbines. For this reason, in the general context of increasing interest towards effective wind turbine condition monitoring techniques, fault diagnosis of electric generators is particularly important. The objective of this study is contributing to the techniques for wind turbine generator fault diagnosis through a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) analysis method. The work is organized as a real-world test-case discussion, involving electric damage to the generator of a Vestas V52 wind turbine sited in southern Italy. SCADA data before and after the generator damage have been analyzed for the target wind turbine and for reference healthy wind turbines from the same site. By doing this, it has been possible to formulate a normal behavior model, based on principal component analysis and support vector regression, for the power and for the voltages and currents of the wind turbine. It is shown that the incipience of the fault can be individuated as a change in the behavior of the residuals between model estimates and measurements. This phenomenon was clearly visible approximately two weeks before the fault. Considering the fast evolution of electrical damage, this result is promising as regards the perspectives of exploiting SCADA data for individuating electric damage with an advance that can be useful for applications in wind energy practice.

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 975
Author(s):  
Yancai Xiao ◽  
Jinyu Xue ◽  
Mengdi Li ◽  
Wei Yang

Fault diagnosis of wind turbines is of great importance to reduce operating and maintenance costs of wind farms. At present, most wind turbine fault diagnosis methods are focused on single faults, and the methods for combined faults usually depend on inefficient manual analysis. Filling the gap, this paper proposes a low-pass filtering empirical wavelet transform (LPFEWT) machine learning based fault diagnosis method for combined fault of wind turbines, which can identify the fault type of wind turbines simply and efficiently without human experience and with low computation costs. In this method, low-pass filtering empirical wavelet transform is proposed to extract fault features from vibration signals, LPFEWT energies are selected to be the inputs of the fault diagnosis model, a grey wolf optimizer hyperparameter tuned support vector machine (SVM) is employed for fault diagnosis. The method is verified on a wind turbine test rig that can simulate shaft misalignment and broken gear tooth faulty conditions. Compared with other models, the proposed model has superiority for this classification problem.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 3396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingzhu Tang ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
Qi Zhao ◽  
Huawei Wu ◽  
Wen Long ◽  
...  

Fault diagnosis and forecasting contribute significantly to the reduction of operating and maintenance associated costs, as well as to improve the resilience of wind turbine systems. Different from the existing fault diagnosis approaches using monitored vibration and acoustic data from the auxiliary equipment, this research presents a novel fault diagnosis and forecasting approach underpinned by a support vector regression model using data obtained by the supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA) of wind turbines (WT). To operate, the extraction of fault diagnosis features is conducted by measuring SCADA parameters. After that, confidence intervals are set up to guide the fault diagnosis implemented by the support vector regression (SVR) model. With the employment of confidence intervals as the performance indicators, an SVR-based fault detecting approach is then developed. Based on the WT SCADA data and the SVR model, a fault diagnosis strategy for large-scale doubly-fed wind turbine systems is investigated. A case study including a one-year monitoring SCADA data collected from a wind farm in Southern China is employed to validate the proposed methodology and demonstrate how it works. Results indicate that the proposed strategy can support the troubleshooting of wind turbine systems with high precision and effective response.


Machines ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi

Pitch angle control is the most common means of adjusting the torque of wind turbines. The verification of its correct function and the optimization of its control are therefore very important for improving the efficiency of wind kinetic energy conversion. On these grounds, this work is devoted to studying the impact of pitch misalignment on wind turbine power production. A test case wind farm sited onshore, featuring five multi-megawatt wind turbines, was studied. On one wind turbine on the farm, a maximum pitch imbalance between the blades of 4.5 ° was detected; therefore, there was an intervention for recalibration. Operational data were available for assessing production improvement after the intervention. Due to the non-stationary conditions to which wind turbines are subjected, this is generally a non-trivial problem. In this work, a general method was formulated for studying this kind of problem: it is based on the study, before and after the upgrade, of the residuals between the measured power output and a reliable model of the power output itself. A careful formulation of the model is therefore crucial: in this work, an automatic feature selection algorithm based on stepwise multivariate regression was adopted, and it allows identification of the most meaningful input variables for a multivariate linear model whose target is the power of the wind turbine whose pitch has been recalibrated. This method can be useful, in general, for the study of wind turbine power upgrades, which have been recently spreading in the wind energy industry, and for the monitoring of wind turbine performances. For the test case of interest, the power of the recalibrated wind turbine is modeled as a linear function of the active and reactive power of the nearby wind turbines, and it is estimated that, after the intervention, the pitch recalibration provided a 5.5% improvement in the power production below rated power. Wind turbine practitioners, in general, should pay considerable attention to the pitch imbalance, because it increases loads and affects the residue lifetime; in particular, the results of this study indicate that severe pitch misalignment can heavily impact power production.


2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Francesco Natili

Abstract Multi-megawatt wind turbines are nowadays a mature technology, and therefore, there is considerable scientific and industrial attention to the opportunity of further improving the efficiency of wind kinetic energy conversion into electricity. One of the major developments in this field of research regards the optimization of wind turbine control. This work deals with a test case of yaw control optimization on a 2-MW wind turbine sited in Italy. The objective of the work is to compute the performance improvement provided by the upgrade after some months of operation. This has been accomplished through the formulation of an appropriate model for the power of the wind turbine of interest and the analysis of the residuals between model estimates and measurements before and after the upgrade. In this work, a general procedure for selecting a robust multivariate linear model is adopted, and the resulting model, employing as input variables several operational variables from the nearby wind turbines in the farm, is used for quantifying the performance improvement. The estimate is that this upgrade provides a 0.8% improvement of the annual energy production.


Machines ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Francesco Natili

The optimization of wind energy conversion efficiency has been recently boosting the technology improvement and the scientific comprehension of wind turbines. In this context, the yawing behavior of wind turbines has become a key topic: the yaw control can actually be exploited for optimization at the level of single wind turbine and of wind farm (for example, through active control of wakes). On these grounds, this work is devoted to the study of the yaw control optimization on a 2 MW wind turbine. The upgrade is estimated by analysing the difference between the measured post-upgrade power and a data driven model of the power according to the pre-upgrade behavior. Particular attention has therefore been devoted to the formulation of a reliable model for the pre-upgrade power of the wind turbine of interest, as a function of the operation variables of all the nearby wind turbines in the wind farm: the high correlation between the possible covariates of the model indicates that Principal Component Regression (PCR) is an adequate choice. Using this method, the obtained result for the selected test case is that the yaw control optimization provides a 1% of annual energy production improvement. This result indicates that wind turbine control optimization can non-negligibly improve the efficiency of wind turbine technology.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 3018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Vidal ◽  
Francesc Pozo ◽  
Christian Tutivén

Due to the increasing installation of wind turbines in remote locations, both onshore and offshore, advanced fault detection and classification strategies have become crucial to accomplish the required levels of reliability and availability. In this work, without using specific tailored devices for condition monitoring but only increasing the sampling frequency in the already available (in all commercial wind turbines) sensors of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, a data-driven multi-fault detection and classification strategy is developed. An advanced wind turbine benchmark is used. The wind turbine we consider is subject to different types of faults on actuators and sensors. The main challenges of the wind turbine fault detection lie in their non-linearity, unknown disturbances, and significant measurement noise at each sensor. First, the SCADA measurements are pre-processed by group scaling and feature transformation (from the original high-dimensional feature space to a new space with reduced dimensionality) based on multiway principal component analysis through sample-wise unfolding. Then, 10-fold cross-validation support vector machines-based classification is applied. In this work, support vector machines were used as a first choice for fault detection as they have proven their robustness for some particular faults, but at the same time have never accomplished the detection and classification of all the proposed faults considered in this work. To this end, the choice of the features as well as the selection of data are of primary importance. Simulation results showed that all studied faults were detected and classified with an overall accuracy of 98.2%. Finally, it is noteworthy that the prediction speed allows this strategy to be deployed for online (real-time) condition monitoring in wind turbines.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 3258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zidong Wu ◽  
Xiaoli Wang ◽  
Baochen Jiang

In order to improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis on wind turbines, this paper presents a method of wind turbine fault diagnosis based on ReliefF algorithm and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm by using the data in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The algorithm consists of the following two parts: The first part is the ReliefF multi-classification feature selection algorithm. According to the SCADA history data and the wind turbines fault record, the ReliefF algorithm is used to select feature parameters that are highly correlated with common faults. The second part is the XGBoost fault recognition algorithm. First of all, we use the historical data records as the input, and use the ReliefF algorithm to select the SCADA system observation features with high correlation with the fault classification, then use these feature data to build the XGBoost multi classification fault identification model, and finally we input the monitoring data generated by the actual running wind turbine into the XGBoost model to get the operation status of the wind turbine. We compared the algorithm proposed in this paper with other algorithms, such as radial basis function-Support Vector Machine (rbf-SVM) and Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) classification algorithms, and the results showed that the classification accuracy using “ReliefF + XGBoost” algorithm was higher than other algorithms.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (21) ◽  
pp. 6905
Author(s):  
Ling Zhou ◽  
Qiancheng Zhao ◽  
Xian Wang ◽  
Anfeng Zhu

When the state of the wind turbine sensors, especially the anemometer, appears abnormal it will cause unnecessary wind loss and affect the correctness of other parameters of the whole system. It is very important to build a simple and accurate fault diagnosis model. In this paper, the model has been established based on the Random Walk Improved Sparrow Search Algorithm to optimize auto-associative neural network (RWSSA-AANN), and is used for fault diagnosis of wind turbine group anemometers. Using the cluster analysis, six wind turbines are determined to be used as a wind turbine group. The 20,000 sets of normal historical data have been used for training and simulating of the model, and the single and multiple fault states of the anemometer are simulated. Using this model to analyze the wind speed supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA) data of six wind turbines in a wind farm from 2013 to 2017, can effectively diagnose the fault state and reconstruct the fault data. A comparison of the results obtained using the model developed in this work has also been made with the corresponding results generated using AANN without optimization and AANN optimized by genetic algorithm. The comparison results indicate that the model has a higher accuracy and detection rate than AANN, genetic algorithm auto-associative neural network (GA-AANN), and principal component analysis (PCA).


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Astolfi ◽  
Francesco Castellani ◽  
Andrea Lombardi ◽  
Ludovico Terzi

Due to the stochastic nature of the source, wind turbines operate under non-stationary conditions and the extracted power depends non-trivially on ambient conditions and working parameters. It is therefore difficult to establish a normal behavior model for monitoring the performance of a wind turbine and the most employed approach is to be driven by data. The power curve of a wind turbine is the relation between the wind intensity and the extracted power and is widely employed for monitoring wind turbine performance. On the grounds of the above considerations, a recent trend regarding wind turbine power curve analysis consists of the incorporation of the main working parameters (as, for example, the rotor speed or the blade pitch) as input variables of a multivariate regression whose target is the power. In this study, a method for multivariate wind turbine power curve analysis is proposed: it is based on sequential features selection, which employs Support Vector Regression with Gaussian Kernel. One of the most innovative aspects of this study is that the set of possible covariates includes also minimum, maximum and standard deviation of the most important environmental and operational variables. Three test cases of practical interest are contemplated: a Senvion MM92, a Vestas V90 and a Vestas V117 wind turbines owned by the ENGIE Italia company. It is shown that the selection of the covariates depends remarkably on the wind turbine model and this aspect should therefore be taken in consideration in order to customize the data-driven monitoring of the power curve. The obtained error metrics are competitive and in general lower with respect to the state of the art in the literature. Furthermore, minimum, maximum and standard deviation of the main environmental and operation variables are abundantly selected by the feature selection algorithm: this result indicates that the richness of the measurement channels contained in wind turbine Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) data sets should be exploited for monitoring the performance as reliably as possible.


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