On-line vibration monitoring and diagnosing of a multi-megawatt wind turbine gearbox

A wind turbine gearbox is always working under transient and variable load conditions, and its vibration characteristics have a great influence on the reliability and life-span of the whole wind turbine. In this work a remote on-line vibration monitoring system is built to monitor the working performance of a multi-megawatt wind turbine gearbox. The wind turbine gearbox is tested using this system and thus obtains acceleration signals at critical testing points on the case. The resulting vibration signals are analyzed with a comprehensive way including the time domain method, frequency domain method, time-frequency method and wavelet transform method. Furthermore, this paper summarizes the vibration characteristics of the wind turbine gearbox operating in the wind field. This work is believed to be useful for the evaluation of the working performance of the system.