Fault diagnosis and prediction of wind turbine gearbox based on a new hybrid model

Gearbox is an important part of wind turbine. Diagnosing and forecasting gearbox faults of wind turbines can effectively reduce the costs of operation and maintenance and improve the reliability of gearbox operation. Due to high dimensionality and nonlinearity of system parameters, the paper uses the grey relation analysis to select features related to gearbox oil temperature. Features with a relational degree above 0.7 are selected as input data related to oil temperature, including wind speed, ambient temperature, power, and gearbox shaft temperature. Then, a new extreme learning machine with kernel improved by the whale optimization algorithm is established to forecast gearbox oil temperature. Through the residuals between gearbox oil temperature predicted by the proposed model and monitored by the SCADA, whether the gearbox exists faults can be diagnosed. In the case study, the test data was divided into two groups (the test data with and without faults). In the data test without faults, compared with three other models, the proposed model has the smallest false-negative rate (0.211%) and mean absolute percentage error (2.812%). In the data test with faults, the proposed model can diagnose gearbox faults earlier (160 min in advance) than the other three benchmark models. The results show that the proposed hybrid model performs well in the fault diagnosis and prediction of wind turbine gearbox.