Wind Turbine Condition and Power Quality Monitoring by the Approach of Fast Individual Harmonic Extraction

Increasing deployment of wind turbines requires efficientcondition monitoring to ensure the safety and availability of thesemachines. Grid code also requests the operator to enhance themonitoring of the quality of the power generated by the windturbine. Most commercially available wind turbine conditionmonitoring systems are supported by a number of vibration trans-ducers. They consequently are complex in hardware, expensive inprice, but inefficient in computation and particularly lack ofpower quality monitoring ability. In view of this, an innovativeelectrical signal analysis-based wind turbine condition and powerquality monitoring technique is developed in this paper by theapproach of individual harmonic extraction. The proposed tech-nique has been verified in the lab by applying to detecting boththe mechanical and electrical faults emulated on a speciallydesigned wind turbine condition monitoring test rig. Experimentsshow that the proposed technique is not only sensitive to thefaults, but alert to the degradation of power quality.[DOI: 10.1115/1.4023876]Keywords: wind turbine, condition monitoring, fast individualharmonic extraction