New trends and future challenges for wind turbines condition monitoring

As the demand for wind energy continues to grow at exponential rates, reducing operation and maintenance costs and increasing reliability is now a top priority. Aside from developing more advanced wind turbines designs to improve the availability, an effective way to achieve this improvement is to apply reliable and cost-effective condition monitoring techniques. After highlighting on condition monitoring, diagnosis and maintenance theories, this paper outlines the relationship between these theories and related technical concepts. It also takes a look on new trends and future challenges in the wind turbine condition monitoring industry.