Wind Turbine Fault Diagnosis by the Approach of SCADA Alarms Analysis

Abstract

Wind farm operators are overwhelmed by a large amount of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) alarms when faults occur. This paper presents an online root fault identification method for SCADA alarms to assist operators in wind turbine fault diagnosis. The proposed method is based on the similarity analysis between an unknown alarm vector and the feature vectors of known faults. The alarm vector is obtained from segmented alarm lists, which are filtered and simplified. The feature vector, which is a unique signature representing the occurrence of a fault, is extracted from the alarm lists belonging to the same fault. To mine the coupling correspondence between alarms and faults, we define the weights of the alarms in each fault. The similarities is measured by the weighted Euclidean distance and the weighted Hamming distance, respectively. One year of SCADA alarms and maintenance records are used to verify the proposed method. The results show that the performance of the weighted Hamming distance is better than that of the weighted Euclidean distance; 84.1% of alarm lists are labeled with the right root fault.

Keywords

• wind turbine
• SCADA alarms
• fault diagnosis
• root fault identification
• similarity analysis