Fault diagnosis of wind turbine gearbox based on the optimized LSTM neural network with cosine loss

Abstract

The gearbox is one of the most fragile parts of a wind turbine (WT). Fault diagnosis of the WT gearbox is of great importance to reduce operation and maintenance (O&M) costs and improve cost-effectiveness. At present, intelligent fault diagnosis methods based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have been widely adopted. As the traditional softmax loss of an LSTM network usually lacks the power of discrimination, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method for wind turbine gearboxes based on optimized LSTM neural networks with cosine loss (Cos-LSTM). The loss can be converted from Euclid space to angular space by cosine loss, thus eliminating the effect of signal strength and improve the diagnosis accuracy. The energy sequence features and the wavelet energy entropy of the vibration signals are used to evaluate the Cos-LSTM networks. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified with the fault vibration data collected on a gearbox fault diagnosis experimental platform. In addition, the Cos-LSTM method is also compared with other classic fault diagnosis techniques. The results demonstrate that the Cos-LSTM has better performance for gearbox fault diagnosis.