Integrating Structural Health Management with Contingency Control for Wind Turbines

Maximizing turbine up-time and reducing maintenance costs are key technology drivers for wind turbine operators. Components within wind turbines are subject to considerable stresses due to unpredictable environmental conditions resulting from rapidly changing local dynamics. In that context, systems health management has the aim to assess the state-of-health of components within a wind turbine, to estimate remaining life, and to aid in autonomous decision-making to minimize damage to the turbine. Advanced contingency control is one way to enable autonomous decision-making by providing the mechanism to enable safe and efficient turbine operation. The work reported herein explores the integration of condition monitoring of wind turbine blades with contingency control to balance the trade-offs between maintaining system health and energy capture. Results are demonstrated using a high fidelity simulator of a utility-scale wind turbine.

A data-driven framework for remaining useful life estimation

Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is one of the most common tasks in the field of prognostics and structural health management. The aim of this research is to estimate the remaining useful life of an unspecified complex system using some data-driven approaches. The approaches are suitable for problems in which a data library of complete runs of a system is available. Given a non-complete run of the system, the RUL can be predicted using these approaches. Three main RUL prediction algorithms, which cover centralized data processing, decentralize data processing, and in-between, are introduced and evaluated using the data of PHM’08 Challenge Problem. The methods involve the use of some other data processing techniques including wavelets denoise and similarity search. Experiment results show that all of the approaches are effective in performing RUL prediction.