Inter-turn Short Circuit Fault Diagnosis and Severity Estimation for Wind Turbine Generators

While preventive maintenance is crucial in wind turbine operation, conventional condition monitoring systems face limitations in terms of cost and complexity when compared to innovative signal processing techniques and artificial intelligence. In this paper, a cascading deep learning framework is proposed for the monitoring of generator winding conditions, specifically to promptly detect and identify inter-turn short circuit faults and estimate their severity in real time. This framework encompasses the processing of high-resolution current signal samples, coupled with the extraction of current signal features in both time and frequency domains, achieved through discrete wavelet transform. By leveraging long short-term memory recurrent neural networks, our aim is to establish a cost-efficient and reliable condition monitoring system for wind turbine generators. Numeral experiments show an over 97% accuracy for fault diagnosis and severity estimation. More specifically, with the intrinsic feature provided by wavelet transform, the faults can be 100% identified by the diagnosis model.