DEVELOPMENT OF TEST RIG FOR THE CONDITION MONITORING OF WIND TURBINE

Online condition monitoring is an essential task for wind turbine generators' (WTG) reliability enhancement and availability. It leads to early fault detection which can aid in the avoidance of catastrophic failure and reduce the maintenance cost. A wind turbine (WT) test rig is important for the assessment of new methods before introducing them into a health monitoring and integrity diagnosis system. In this paper, a contribution to the development of low-cost WT test rig to assist the condition monitoring of WT is proposed. Depending on wind speed and load conditions, the WTG can operate continuously in non-stationary conditions to assist in condition monitoring. The response of generated current and terminal voltage has also been analysed under speed and load varying conditions. The effectiveness of the setup was benchmarked with already proven WT test rigs. The developed wind turbine emulator (WTE) can be analysed or reconfigured for condition monitoring of wind energy conversion systems (WECS) without the need for real WTs.