An embedded sensor validation system for adaptive condition monitoring of a wind farms

Sensor validation plays a key role in automatic control and online monitoring of complex systems, ensuring high performance and guaranteeing safety. Even in cases of safe industrial processes, the unreliability of sensor measurements may lead to a degraded performance and a reduced system yield. It is therefore both economical and essential to validate the credibility of sensor measurements. Timely detection and accurate diagnosis of actual, or even impending, sensor failures enable appropriate remedial actions to be taken, such as rescheduling of maintenance, reconfiguration of corrupted control loops or initialization of emergency shutdown. This paper presents a sensor validation coprocessing element, which is being developed in a FPGA- based processing node. The goal of the processing node is to provide adaptive conditioning monitoring, for a sensor network operating within a wind farm.