NAREC Knowledge Transfer Partnership
This project seeks to develop a monitoring strategy to effectively detect the mechanical faults which occur in wind turbines.
Project leader
Dr Wenxian Yang
Dates
May 2014 to May 2017
Project staff
Professor Volker Pickert
Dr Pu Shi
Sponsors
Innovate UK
Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult
Description
Commercial condition monitoring systems for wind turbines are mostly vibration-analysis-based systems.
They are good at detecting the mechanical faults occurring in wind turbine drive train. But inefficient in detecting the electrical and power electronic faults. These faults occur in wind turbine generator and power control system.
But long-term wind power practice has revealed vulnerabilities. The wind turbine electrical and power electronic control system are more vulnerable to fail.
In comparison to their mechanical counterpart (e.g. gears and bearings). This is particularly the case in harsh offshore environment.
This project aims to develop an innovative condition monitoring strategy. This strategy not only effectively detects the mechanical faults occurring in wind turbine. It also detects the electrical and power electronic faults occurring in wind turbine generator and power electronic converter.
We developed a turbine drive train test rig so far. This is together with the ORE-CATAPULT Centre. Various kinds of wind turbine mechanical and electrical faults are being emulated.
Also advanced nonlinear signal processing techniques have been successfully developed. These are for processing the data collected for the test rig.