IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v10y2017i11p1853-d118577.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Indicative Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Generator Bearings Using Tower Sound and Vibration

Author

Listed:
  • Ehsan Mollasalehi

    (Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada)

  • David Wood

    (Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada)

  • Qiao Sun

    (Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada)

Abstract

The idea of indicative fault diagnosis based on measuring the wind turbine tower sound and vibration is presented. It had been reported by a wind farm operator that a major fault on the generator bearing causes shock and noise to be heard from the bottom of the wind turbine tower. The work in this paper was conceived to test whether tower top faults could be identified by taking simple measurements at the tower base. Two accelerometers were attached inside the wind turbine tower, and vibration data was collected while the wind turbine was in operation. Tower vibration signals were analyzed using Empirical Mode Decomposition and the outcomes were correlated with the vibration signals acquired directly from the generator bearings. It is shown that the generator bearing fault signatures were present in the vibrations from the tower. The results suggest that useful condition monitoring of nacelle components can be done even when there is no condition monitoring system installed on the generator bearings, as is often the case for older wind turbines. In the second part of the paper, acoustic measurements from a healthy and a faulty wind turbine are shown. The preliminary analysis suggests that the generator bearing fault increases the overall sound pressure level at the bottom of the tower, and is not buried in the background noise.

Suggested Citation

  • Ehsan Mollasalehi & David Wood & Qiao Sun, 2017. "Indicative Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Generator Bearings Using Tower Sound and Vibration," Energies, MDPI, vol. 10(11), pages 1-14, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:10:y:2017:i:11:p:1853-:d:118577
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/11/1853/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/11/1853/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Swanson, Laura, 2001. "Linking maintenance strategies to performance," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(3), pages 237-244, April.
    2. Kusiak, Andrew & Li, Wenyan, 2011. "The prediction and diagnosis of wind turbine faults," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 16-23.
    3. Pierre Tchakoua & René Wamkeue & Mohand Ouhrouche & Fouad Slaoui-Hasnaoui & Tommy Andy Tameghe & Gabriel Ekemb, 2014. "Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring: State-of-the-Art Review, New Trends, and Future Challenges," Energies, MDPI, vol. 7(4), pages 1-36, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francisco Haces-Fernandez, 2021. "Higher Wind: Highlighted Expansion Opportunities to Repower Wind Energy," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(22), pages 1-19, November.
    2. Lixiao Cao & Zheng Qian & Hamid Zareipour & David Wood & Ehsan Mollasalehi & Shuangshu Tian & Yan Pei, 2018. "Prediction of Remaining Useful Life of Wind Turbine Bearings under Non-Stationary Operating Conditions," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(12), pages 1-20, November.
    3. Jong-Yih Kuo & Shang-Yi You & Hui-Chi Lin & Chao-Yang Hsu & Baiying Lei, 2022. "Constructing Condition Monitoring Model of Wind Turbine Blades," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(6), pages 1-13, March.
    4. Francesco Castellani & Luigi Garibaldi & Alessandro Paolo Daga & Davide Astolfi & Francesco Natili, 2020. "Diagnosis of Faulty Wind Turbine Bearings Using Tower Vibration Measurements," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(6), pages 1-18, March.
    5. Ravi Kumar Pandit & Davide Astolfi & Isidro Durazo Cardenas, 2023. "A Review of Predictive Techniques Used to Support Decision Making for Maintenance Operations of Wind Turbines," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(4), pages 1-17, February.
    6. Muhammad Amir Khan & Bilal Asad & Karolina Kudelina & Toomas Vaimann & Ants Kallaste, 2022. "The Bearing Faults Detection Methods for Electrical Machines—The State of the Art," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-54, December.
    7. Jijian Lian & Hongzhen Wang & Haijun Wang, 2018. "Study on Vibration Transmission among Units in Underground Powerhouse of a Hydropower Station," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(11), pages 1-22, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Odofin, Sarah & Bentley, Edward & Aikhuele, Daniel, 2018. "Robust fault estimation for wind turbine energy via hybrid systems," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 289-299.
    2. Liang, Jinping & Zhang, Ke & Al-Durra, Ahmed & Zhou, Daming, 2020. "A novel fault diagnostic method in power converters for wind power generation system," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 266(C).
    3. Stetco, Adrian & Dinmohammadi, Fateme & Zhao, Xingyu & Robu, Valentin & Flynn, David & Barnes, Mike & Keane, John & Nenadic, Goran, 2019. "Machine learning methods for wind turbine condition monitoring: A review," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 620-635.
    4. Kevin Leahy & Colm Gallagher & Peter O’Donovan & Ken Bruton & Dominic T. J. O’Sullivan, 2018. "A Robust Prescriptive Framework and Performance Metric for Diagnosing and Predicting Wind Turbine Faults Based on SCADA and Alarms Data with Case Study," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-21, July.
    5. Xin Wu & Hong Wang & Guoqian Jiang & Ping Xie & Xiaoli Li, 2019. "Monitoring Wind Turbine Gearbox with Echo State Network Modeling and Dynamic Threshold Using SCADA Vibration Data," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-19, March.
    6. Ana Rita Nunes & Hugo Morais & Alberto Sardinha, 2021. "Use of Learning Mechanisms to Improve the Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbine Generators: A Review," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(21), pages 1-22, November.
    7. Artigao, Estefania & Martín-Martínez, Sergio & Honrubia-Escribano, Andrés & Gómez-Lázaro, Emilio, 2018. "Wind turbine reliability: A comprehensive review towards effective condition monitoring development," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 228(C), pages 1569-1583.
    8. Romero, Antonio & Soua, Slim & Gan, Tat-Hean & Wang, Bin, 2018. "Condition monitoring of a wind turbine drive train based on its power dependant vibrations," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 817-827.
    9. Hong Wang & Hongbin Wang & Guoqian Jiang & Jimeng Li & Yueling Wang, 2019. "Early Fault Detection of Wind Turbines Based on Operational Condition Clustering and Optimized Deep Belief Network Modeling," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-22, March.
    10. Pliego Marugán, Alberto & Peco Chacón, Ana María & García Márquez, Fausto Pedro, 2019. "Reliability analysis of detecting false alarms that employ neural networks: A real case study on wind turbines," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    11. Tongke Yuan & Zhifeng Sun & Shihao Ma, 2019. "Gearbox Fault Prediction of Wind Turbines Based on a Stacking Model and Change-Point Detection," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(22), pages 1-20, November.
    12. Chen, Xuejun & Yang, Yongming & Cui, Zhixin & Shen, Jun, 2019. "Vibration fault diagnosis of wind turbines based on variational mode decomposition and energy entropy," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 1100-1109.
    13. Habibi, Hamed & Howard, Ian & Simani, Silvio, 2019. "Reliability improvement of wind turbine power generation using model-based fault detection and fault tolerant control: A review," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 877-896.
    14. Arkaitz Rabanal & Alain Ulazia & Gabriel Ibarra-Berastegi & Jon Sáenz & Unai Elosegui, 2018. "MIDAS: A Benchmarking Multi-Criteria Method for the Identification of Defective Anemometers in Wind Farms," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-19, December.
    15. Boudy Bilal & Kaan Yetilmezsoy & Mohammed Ouassaid, 2024. "Benchmarking of Various Flexible Soft-Computing Strategies for the Accurate Estimation of Wind Turbine Output Power," Energies, MDPI, vol. 17(3), pages 1-36, February.
    16. Przemyslaw Baranski & Piotr Pietrzak, 2016. "Computational Effective Fault Detection by Means of Signature Functions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-20, March.
    17. Mehrjoo, Mehrdad & Jafari Jozani, Mohammad & Pawlak, Miroslaw, 2021. "Toward hybrid approaches for wind turbine power curve modeling with balanced loss functions and local weighting schemes," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 218(C).
    18. Pinjala, Srinivas Kumar & Pintelon, Liliane & Vereecke, Ann, 2006. "An empirical investigation on the relationship between business and maintenance strategies," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(1), pages 214-229, November.
    19. Jin, Xin & Ju, Wenbin & Zhang, Zhaolong & Guo, Lianxin & Yang, Xiangang, 2016. "System safety analysis of large wind turbines," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1293-1307.
    20. Chiacchio, Ferdinando & D’Urso, Diego & Famoso, Fabio & Brusca, Sebastian & Aizpurua, Jose Ignacio & Catterson, Victoria M., 2018. "On the use of dynamic reliability for an accurate modelling of renewable power plants," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 605-621.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:10:y:2017:i:11:p:1853-:d:118577. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.