A review of wind turbine bearing condition monitoring: State of the art and challenges

Since the early 1980s, wind power technology has experienced an immense growth with respect to both the turbine size and market share. As the demand for large-scale wind turbines and for operation & maintenance cost continues to raise, the interest on condition monitoring system has increased rapidly. The main components of wind turbines are the focus of all CMS since they frequently cause high repair costs and equipment downtime. However, vast quantities of their failures are caused due to a bearing failure. Therefore, bearing condition monitoring becomes crucial. This paper aims at providing a state-of-the-art review on wind turbine bearing condition monitoring techniques such as acoustic measurement, electrical effects monitoring, power quality, temperature monitoring, wear debris analysis and vibration analysis. Furthermore, this paper will present a literature review and discuss several technical, financial and operational challenges from the purchase of the CMS to the wind farm monitoring stage. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.