Wind turbine control strategy impacts to gearbox failure features

Accurate wind turbine fault diagnosis is a challenge problem currently due to the complexity of a wind turbine system. A wind turbine is not only influenced by random wind speed but also variable control strategy which is designed to extract maximum energy production by assuming the wind turbine is operating healthily. But once a failure occurred in a wind turbine, its performance will deviate from healthy condition and lead to unpredictable features. This paper presents distinguishable wind turbine failure features under two different control strategies by introducing the same gearbox failure in the simulation model. The result shows that different control strategies cause possible opposite failure features of the same failure mode, which means understanding a WT control strategy is the prerequisite of accurate fault detection. The result obtained in this paper is useful for improving accuracy of failure diagnosis.