Wind turbine systems operational state and reliability evaluation: An artificial neural network approach

Abstract

The increased role of wind turbine systems makes it important for its operational states to be continuously monitored and optimized. This goal can be achieved using existing methods, which relies on closed-form expressions. The use of these methods, however, becomes challenging when interacting parameters cannot be fully presented with closed form expressions. In this paper, an artificial neural network (ANN) based algorithm is proposed as a solution to this problem. This algorithm is used to estimate wind turbine systems operational state and reliability. The proposed method is able to provide a more holistic approach to manage a wind turbine system with respect to the problem mentioned above. Simulation results show that the developed ANN can predict the average number of failures per year, distribution of failure and average downtime per failure with good accuracy. This was achieved using an ANN model with 5-15-3 architecture. The model generates mean square errors of 4.6 × 10-3, 4.2 ×10-3, and 4.0 × 10-3 at the training, validation, and testing stages, respectively. The study is beneficial to wind turbine practitioners and manufacturers as its findings can provide in-depth understandings of reliability issues of the system.