A Robust Wind Turbine Component Health Status Indicator

Abstract

Wind turbine components’ failure prognosis allows wind farm owners to apply predictive maintenance techniques to their fleets. Determining the health status of a turbine’s component typically requires verifying many variables that should be monitored simultaneously. The scope of this study is the selection of the more relevant variables and the generation of a health status indicator (Failure Index) to be considered as a decision criterion in Operation and Maintenance activities. The proposed methodology is based on Gaussian Mixture Copula Models (GMCMs) combined with a smoothing method (Cubic spline smoothing) to define a component’s health index based on the previous behavior and relationships between the considered variables. The GMCM allows for determining the component’s status in a multivariate environment, providing the selected variables’ joint probability and obtaining an easy-to-track univariate health status indicator. When the health of a component is degrading, anomalous behavior becomes apparent in certain Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) signals. By monitoring these SCADA signals using this indicator, the proposed anomaly detection method could capture the deviations from the healthy working state. The resulting indicator shows whether any failure is likely to occur in a wind turbine component and would aid in a preventive intervention scheduling.