Diagnostic Models for Wind Turbine Gearbox Components Using SCADA Time Series Data

This paper presents a scalable, autonomous framework for diagnostics of wind turbine gearbox failures using a multi-feature supervisory control and data acquisition data set spanning multiple years. Because of the size of the data set studied, all algorithms were constructed to be scalable using a Spark-Hadoop data framework. An unsupervised approach was used to detect significant failures based on predetermined criteria. The initial criteria selected were an abnormal spike in turbine component temperature followed by a turbine power off, which helps reduce the number of potential false alarms. To detect abnormal spikes in component temperature, a model was introduced to adjust the temperature data for effects caused by ambient temperature and normal temperature increases when loaded. This study evaluates methods for normalizing temperature sensor data to identify anomalies. The models that performed the best were a linear regression and a multivariate polynomial regression. The proposed process for finding failures has tunable parameters that can be adjusted to be more or less sensitive. The combination of sensor data normalization and application of these criteria is successful in finding turbine failures resulting in downtime. The proposed methods can operate without failure or maintenance logs and can be utilized for offline analysis of large high-resolution data sets.