Design and development of a wind turbine test rig for condition monitoring studies

Wind energy is an emerging, clean and renewable source of energy. It is estimated that by year 2035, wind energy will be generating more than 25% of the world´s electricity according to International Energy Agency (IEA). With the increase in demand for wind energy, its maintenance issues are becoming more prominent. The scheduled maintenance is more economical than unscheduled repair resulting from failure. So a continuous condition monitoring of various critical components like bearings, gearbox, and shafts of wind turbine is essential in order to enable predictive maintenance. 10% of the total failure is contributed by the bearings, shaft and gear box failures, but the downtime is more than 50% of the total downtime. This paper discusses the development of a bench-top test rig which is designed to mimic the operating condition of an actual wind turbine and use it for monitoring its condition so as to diagnose the incipient faults in its critical components using latest machine learning algorithms such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN).