A Parameter Selection Method for Wind Turbine Health Management through SCADA Data

Wind turbine anomaly or failure detection using machine learning techniques through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is drawing wide attention from academic and industry While parameter selection is important for modelling a wind turbine's condition, only a few papers have been published focusing on this issue and in those papers interconnections among sub-components in a wind turbine are used to address this problem. However, merely the interconnections for decision making sometimes is too general to provide a parameter list considering the differences of each SCADA dataset. In this paper, a method is proposed to provide more detailed suggestions on parameter selection based on mutual information. First, the copula is proven to be capable of simplifying the estimation of mutual information. Then an empirical copula-based mutual information estimation method (ECMI) is introduced for application. After that, a real SCADA dataset is adopted to test the method, and the results show the effectiveness of the ECMI in providing parameter selection suggestions when physical knowledge is not accurate enough.