Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine with Alarms Based on Word Embedding and Siamese Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Alarms generated by a wind turbine alarm system indicate the need for emergency action by operators to protect the turbine from running into risky conditions. However, it can be challenging for operators to identify the fault types that trigger alarms, particularly with few labeled fault samples. This paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis method for wind turbines with alarms that collaboratively uses labeled and unlabeled alarms to improve diagnosis accuracy. First, the proposed method distinguishes different alarm sequences using a designed Siamese convolutional neural network with an embedding layer (S-ECNN) model. Then, the fault category of an unknown alarm sequence is diagnosed based on similarity scores. Specifically, the Skip-gram model is used to mine potential relationships among alarms in unlabeled alarm sequences, and pretrained alarm vectors are obtained. In the S-ECNN model, the pretrained alarm vectors are further optimized and trained using labeled alarm sequences. The similarity scores are calculated based on the distance between the extracted discriminative features of alarm sequences. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using actual alarm data from a wind farm.

Keywords

• wind turbines
• alarms
• fault diagnosis
• Siamese convolutional neural network
• word embedding