Condition Monitoring System of Wind Turbine Generators

The development and implementation of the condition monitoring systems (CMS) play a significant role in overcoming the number of failures in the wind turbine generators that result from the harsh operation conditions, such as over temperature, particularly when turbines are deployed offshore. In order to increase the reliability of the wind energy industry, monitoring the operation conditions of wind generators is essential to detect the immediate faults rapidly and perform appropriate preventative maintenance. CMS helps to avoid failures, decrease the potential shutdowns while running, reduce the maintenance and operation costs and maintain wind turbines protected. The knowledge of wind turbine generators\u27 faults, such as stator and rotor inter-turn faults, is indispensable to perform the condition monitoring accurately, and assist with maintenance decision making. Many techniques are utilized to avoid the occurrence of failures in wind turbine generators. The majority of the previous techniques that are applied to monitor the wind generator conditions are based on electrical and mechanical concepts and theories. An advanced CMS can be implemented by using a variety of different techniques and methods to confirm the validity of the obtained electrical and mechanical condition monitoring algorithms. This thesis is focused on applying CMS on wind generators due to high temperature by contributing the statistical, thermal, mathematical, and reliability analyses, and mechanical concepts with the electrical methodology, instead of analyzing the electrical signal and frequencies trends only. The newly developed algorithms can be compared with previous condition monitoring methods, which use the electrical approach in order to establish their advantages and limitations. For example, the hazard reliability techniques of wind generators based on CMS are applied to develop a proper maintenance strategy, which aims to extend the system life-time and reduce the potential failures during operation due to high generator temperatures. In addition, the use of some advanced statistical techniques, such as regression models, is proposed to perform a CMS on wind generators. Further, the mechanical and thermal characteristics are employed to diagnose the faults that can occur in wind generators. The rate of change in the generator temperature with respect to the induced electrical torque; for instance is considered as an indicator to the occurrence of faults in the generators. The behavior of the driving torque of the rotating permanent magnet with respect to the permanent magnet temperature can also utilize to indicate the operation condition. The permanent magnet model describes the rotating permanent magnet condition during operation in the normal and abnormal situations. In this context, a set of partial differential equations is devolved for the characterization of the rotations of the permanent. Finally, heat transfer analysis and fluid mechanics methods are employed to develop a suitable CMS on the wind generators by analyzing the operation conditions of the generator\u27s heat exchanger. The proposed methods applied based on real data of different wind turbines, and the obtained results were very convincing