A Novel Fault Prediction Method of Wind Turbine Gearbox Based on Pair-Copula Construction and BP Neural Network

Among the various maintenance technologies of wind turbines, online fault prediction technology is a kind of more cost-effective and reliable method. It may also be the most promising method for wind turbines with potential mechanical faults. SCADA data-based online condition monitoring technology has become a hot spot in current researches. Therefore, a novel fault prediction method based on the Pair-Copula model is proposed in this study. First, the conditional mutual information method is introduced to screen out useful variables from a number of variables. Then aiming at the limitation that the conventional Copula model can only deal with two-dimensional variables, the Pair-Copula model is introduced. In addition, the complexity of the prediction model and the dimension of the input variables are greatly reduced by the Pair-Copula model. So, the BP neural network is selected to complete the prediction model. A combined model based on BP neural network and Pair-Copula model is proposed. In order to solve the problem that the conventional Pair-Copula model cannot process real-time data which must be required in fault prediction, a kind of improved Pair-Copula model combined with the kernel density estimation is used to calculate the real-time data. Finally, the proposed method is validated with real data from a 1.5 MW wind turbine, and the effectiveness is confirmed.