Wind turbine fault simulation

Due to its complex design and stochastic environment that it is exposed to the ultimate symptom exhibited by a wind turbine with malfunction varies. It is a challenge to understand wind turbines' failure mechanism and the root causes which is because it is an integration system with both mechanical and electrical components. To understand the effect of degraded gearbox transmission efficiency to wind turbine system, a simulation model is developed to observe variation of rotor torque, generator torque, pitch angles. A wind turbine system dynamic response of output power is compared with the situation of a healthy turbine. It shows that for a wind turbine with degraded gearbox, increase of rotor torque and detectable pitch angle variations are obtained at above rated wind speed range and decreasing generator torque is observed at below rated wind speed range. Though gearbox degraded efficiency has no significant effects to system dynamic response, a lower power output should be observed at below rated wind speed range of power curve. The result obtained in this paper is useful for effective algorithm development of wind turbine fault detection.