A Two-Stage Fault Detection and Classification Scheme for Electrical Pitch Drives in Offshore Wind Farms Using Support Vector Machine

Pitch systems are one of the components with the most frequent failure in wind turbines. This paper presents a two-stage fault detection and classification scheme for electric motor drives in wind turbine pitch systems. The presented approach is suitable for application in offshore wind farms with electric pitch systems driven by induction motors as well as permanent magnet synchronous motors. The adopted strategy utilizes three-phase motor current sensing at the pitch drives for fault detection and only when a fault condition is detected at this stage, features extracted from the current signals are transmitted to a support vector machine classifier located centrally to the wind farm. The proposed method is validated in an in-house setup of the pitch drive.