Wind turbine performance monitoring based on nonlinear state estimate technique

The growing wind turbines aging problem leads to high maintenance costs and low economy benefit It is crucial to monitor the wind turbine performance in real time. This paper uses the utilization rate of wind energy to represent wind turbine performance which comprehensively indicates changes of multiple factors. Firstly, several crucial factors including turbulence intensity, tip speed ratio, yaw and so on which influence utilization rate of wind energy are extracted from Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Then model of the power coefficient is built using nonlinear state estimate technique (NSET). The model reflects the relationship of the utilization rate of wind energy and other influence factors when wind turbines operate normally. After the establishment of the model, the real time SCADA data provides the input vector and an output vector will be estimated with the NSET model. If the input vector is abnormal, the predicted residual will increase observably, which indicates the wind turbine has failure. Several experiments are conducted and the method works quite promising.