Fault diagnosis of wind turbine using control loop current signals

This paper presents a fault diagnosis method for direct-drive wind turbine with permanent magnet synchronous generator (D-PMSG) by using generator control loop current signals. In this method, the Vold-Kalman filtering order tracking technique is used to track the fault characteristic harmonic components from q-axis current signals. Then the envelopes of amplitudes of the fault harmonic components are calculated and applied for fault diagnosis of D-PMSG. To verify the proposed method, the simulation model is established in MATLAB/Simulink and the simulations are carried out. The results show that the proposed method is effective, where blade imbalance and winding asymmetry faults are successfully detected.