Forecast of faults in a wind turbine gearbox

The maintenance costs associated with wind turbines assumes an important weight in the operation of wind parks. The main objective of wind farms operators is to run their parks most economically, to increase their profits. An adequate maintenance planning is essential to an effective operating costs reduction, compared with traditional maintenance techniques. Tools to detect the onset of mechanical and electrical faults in wind turbines at a sufficiently early stage are very important for well planned maintenance actions, because these actions can reduce the outage time and can prevent bigger faults that can lead to machine outage. The amount of information obtained from SCADA systems of wind farms is huge. The use of neural networks to deal with all the information and try to detect faults in some equipment in a early stage is a promising technique.