SCADA-based wind turbine anomaly detection using Gaussian Process (GP) models for wind turbine condition monitoring purposes

The penetration of wind energy into power systems is steadily increasing; this highlights the importance of operations and maintenance, and also specifically the role of condition monitoring. Wind turbine power curves based on SCADA data provide a cost-effective approach to wind turbine health monitoring. This paper proposes a Gaussian Process (a non-parametric machine learning approach) based algorithm for condition monitoring. The standard IEC binned power curve together with individual bin probability distributions can be used to identify operational anomalies. The IEC approach can also be modified to create a form of real-time power curve. Both of these approaches will be compared with a Gaussian Process model to assess both speed and accuracy of anomaly detection. Significant yaw misalignment, reflecting a yaw control error or fault, results in a loss of power. Such a fault is quite common and early detection is important to prevent loss of power generation. Yaw control error provides a useful case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and allows the advantages and limitations of the proposed methods to be determined

Modelling wind turbine power curves based on Frank’s copula

Presented at: 21st International Conference on Renewable Energies and Power Quality (ICREPQ’23)In the study of wind turbines, one of the most relevant and useful indicators is the power curve. It has been shown to be of paramount importance in evaluating turbine performance and therefore reducing operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. Various techniques can be applied to model and obtain the shape of this curve, which relates the electrical power generated by a turbine to the wind speed. Statistical copulas are used in this paper, a tool used in other fields such as econometrics, and whose potential lies in its ability to capture the complex dependency between the variables involved. In particular, the Frank copula is applied to obtain a probabilistic model of the power curve of a wind turbine. This model is compared with the Gaussian Mixture Model, a technique widely used to obtain parametric probabilistic models. As a result of this comparison, it is observed that the Frank copula model fits the power curve of the wind turbine with greater precision and reliability, which would allow its use for prediction and fault detection

Internet of Things Applications as Energy Internet in Smart Grids and Smart Environments

Energy Internet (EI) has been recently introduced as a new concept, which aims to evolve smart grids by integrating several energy forms into an extremely flexible and effective grid. In this paper, we have comprehensively analyzed Internet of Things (IoT) applications enabled for smart grids and smart environments, such as smart cities, smart homes, smart metering, and energy management infrastructures to investigate the development of the EI based IoT applications. These applications are promising key areas of the EI concept, since the IoT is considered one of the most important driving factors of the EI. Moreover, we discussed the challenges, open issues, and future research opportunities for the EI concept based on IoT applications and addressed some important research areas

Using SCADA data for wind turbine condition monitoring - a review

The ever increasing size of wind turbines and the move to build them offshore have accelerated the need for optimised maintenance strategies in order to reduce operating costs. Predictive maintenance requires detailed information on the condition of turbines. Due to the high costs of dedicated condition monitoring systems based on mainly vibration measurements, the use of data from the turbine Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is appealing. This review discusses recent research using SCADA data for failure detection and condition monitoring, focussing on approaches which have already proved their ability to detect anomalies in data from real turbines. Approaches are categorised as (i) trending, (ii) clustering, (iii) normal behaviour modelling, (iv) damage modelling and (v) assessment of alarms and expert systems. Potential for future research on the use of SCADA data for advanced turbine condition monitoring is discussed

Data-driven condition monitoring approaches to improving power output of wind turbines

This paper presents data-driven approaches to improving active power output of wind turbines based on estimating their health condition. The main procedure includes estimations of fault degree and health condition level, and optimal power dispatch control. The proposed method can adjust active power output of individual turbines according to their health condition and can thus optimize the total energy output of wind farm. In the paper, extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm and bonferroni interval are applied to estimate fault degree while analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to estimate the health condition level. A scheme for power dispatch control is formulated based on the estimated health condition. Models have been identified from supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data acquired from an operational wind farm, which contains temperature data of gearbox bearing and generator winding. The results show that the proposed method can maximize the operation efficiency of the wind farm while significantly reduce the fatigue loading on the faulty wind turbines

Multivariate data-driven models for wind turbine power curves including sub-component temperatures

The most commonly employed tool for wind turbine performance analysis is the power curve, which is the relation between wind intensity and power. The diffusion of SCADA systems has boosted the adoption of data-driven approaches to power curves. In particular, a recent research line involves multivariate methods, employing further input variables in addition to the wind speed. In this work, an innovative contribution is investigated, which is the inclusion of thirteen sub-component temperatures as possible covariates. This is discussed through a real-world test case, based on data provided by ENGIE Italia. Two models are analyzed: support vector regression with Gaussian kernel and Gaussian process regression. The input variables are individuated through a sequential feature selection algorithm. The sub-component temperatures are abundantly selected as input variables, proving the validity of the idea proposed in this work. The obtained error metrics are lower with respect to benchmark models employing more typical input variables: the resulting mean absolute error is 1.35% of the rated power. The results of the two types of selected regressions are not remarkably different. This supports that the qualifying points are, rather than the model type, the use and the selection of a potentially vast number of input variables

Applications and Modeling Techniques of Wind Turbine Power Curve for Wind Farms - A Review

In the wind energy industry, the power curve represents the relationship between the “wind speed” at the hub height and the corresponding “active power” to be generated. It is the most versatile condition indicator and of vital importance in several key applications, such as wind turbine selection, capacity factor estimation, wind energy assessment and forecasting, and condition monitoring, among others. Ensuring an effective implementation of the aforementioned applications mostly requires a modeling technique that best approximates the normal properties of an optimal wind turbines operation in a particular wind farm. This challenge has drawn the attention of wind farm operators and researchers towards the “state of the art” in wind energy technology. This paper provides an exhaustive and updated review on power curve based applications, the most common anomaly and fault types including their root-causes, along with data preprocessing and correction schemes (i.e., filtering, clustering, isolation, and others), and modeling techniques (i.e., parametric and non-parametric) which cover a wide range of algorithms. More than 100 references, for the most part selected from recently published journal articles, were carefully compiled to properly assess the past, present, and future research directions in this active domain

Data-driven model-based approaches to condition monitoring and improving power output of wind turbines

The development of the wind farm has grown dramatically in worldwide over the past 20 years. In order to satisfy the reliability requirement of the power grid, the wind farm should generate sufficient active power to make the frequency stable. Consequently, many methods have been proposed to achieve optimizing wind farm active power dispatch strategy. In previous research, it assumed that each wind turbine has the same health condition in the wind farm, hence the power dispatch for healthy and sub-healthy wind turbines are treated equally. It will accelerate the sub-healthy wind turbines damage, which may leads to decrease generating efficiency and increases operating cost of the wind farm. Thus, a novel wind farm active power dispatch strategy considering the health condition of wind turbines and wind turbine health condition estimation method are the proposed. A modelbased CM approach for wind turbines based on the extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) are used to estimate health condition of the wind turbine. Essentially, the aim of the proposed method is to make the healthy wind turbines generate power as much as possible and reduce fatigue loads on the sub-healthy wind turbines. Compared with previous methods, the proposed methods is able to dramatically reduce the fatigue loads on subhealthy wind turbines under the condition of satisfying network operator active power demand and maximize the operation efficiency of those healthy turbines. Subsequently, shunt active power filters (SAPFs) are used to improve power quality of the grid by mitigating harmonics injected from nonlinear loads, which is further to increase the reliability of the wind turbine system