New Approaches on Maintenance Management for Wind Turbines Based on Acoustic Inspection

Abstract

Nowadays, maintenance management is changing due to the new technologies in inspection and monitorization systems to reduce the production costs for the companies and risks for the operator. Maintenance management is a key factor in some industries as renewable energy, due to the high-cost consequences of a wrong failure detection in a wind turbine. Therefore, advances in condition monitoring systems are required for an early failure diagnosis. This paper contributes to the actual wind turbines diagnosis methods with a novel non-destructive inspection system based on acoustic analysis of the wind turbine condition. The paper presents a condition monitoring system based on an acoustic sensor embedded in an unmanned aerial vehicle to collect acoustic signals emitted by the wind turbine. The signals are sent to a ground remote-control centre, and then they are analysed. This data acquisition system needs of a qualitative and quantitative analysis to classify and identify the condition of the wind turbine. Wavelet transforms are employed for filtering the signals and pattern recognition. Several scenarios are considered and analysed considering the main mechanical parts and components of a wind turbine.