Vibration condition monitoring system for wind turbine bearings based on noise suppression with multi-point data fusion

A noise suppression method for feature frequency extraction that is supplemented with multi-point data fusion was investigated in consideration of issues involving wind turbine vibration signals subject to high noise disturbance. The difficulty of extracting early weak fault features was examined as well. First, a de-noising and feature extraction method that uses EMD-Correlation was developed by adding empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and autocorrelation de-noising to the wavelet package transform under the effects of white noise and short-term disturbance noise in wind turbine vibration signals. Second, an EMD-Correlation analysis model for feature frequency extraction supplemented with multi-point data fusion was established with reference to adaptive resonance theory-2 to highlight the feature frequency of a possible early weak fault. Third, the results obtained with the actual and simulated fault vibration signals of wind turbine bearing faults and the outcomes of comparing the different feature frequency extraction methods show that the proposed method of EMD-Correlation that is supplemented with multi-point data fusion can not only effectively reduce white noise and short-term disturbance noise but can also extract the feature frequency of early weak faults. Finally, prototype hardware and software were developed for a wind turbine condition monitoring system based on the aforementioned fault feature extraction algorithms and tested in an actual wind turbine generation system. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.