Diagnostic Strategies for Microturbines Operating Status Applied to Predictive Maintenance: Experimental Test Case

The current study represents a preliminary step towards detecting operating problems in wind microturbines automatically. The electrical frequency signal generated by the turbine allows for the detection of operating issues during its power stage. To conduct a comprehensive study, a vertical-axis microturbine has been tested, under various failure conditions, inside a closedloop wind tunnel. An electronic data acquisition system has been developed to continuously measure the frequency signal during the experiments. The output data, including the power and the frequency signals, has been analyzed in terms of average frequency and standard deviation. The collected and stored data is accessible through an operation and maintenance system, which uses an AI-based algorithm and a Jupyter Notebook tool that is executed in Python.