Real-time predictive maintenance for wind turbines using Big Data frameworks

This work presents the evolution of a solution for predictive maintenance to a Big Data environment. The proposed adaptation aims for predicting failures on wind turbines using a data-driven solution deployed in the cloud and which is composed by three main modules. (i) A predictive model generator which generates predictive models for each monitored wind turbine by means of Random Forest algorithm. (ii) A monitoring agent that makes predictions every 10 minutes about failures in wind turbines during the next hour. Finally, (iii) a dashboard where given predictions can be visualized. To implement the solution Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Mesos and HDFS have been used. Therefore, we have improved the previous work in terms of data process speed, scalability and automation. In addition, we have provided fault-tolerant functionality with a centralized access point from where the status of all the wind turbines of a company localized all over the world can be monitored, reducing O&M costs

“Dust in the wind...”, deep learning application to wind energy time series forecasting

To balance electricity production and demand, it is required to use different prediction techniques extensively. Renewable energy, due to its intermittency, increases the complexity and uncertainty of forecasting, and the resulting accuracy impacts all the different players acting around the electricity systems around the world like generators, distributors, retailers, or consumers. Wind forecasting can be done under two major approaches, using meteorological numerical prediction models or based on pure time series input. Deep learning is appearing as a new method that can be used for wind energy prediction. This work develops several deep learning architectures and shows their performance when applied to wind time series. The models have been tested with the most extensive wind dataset available, the National Renewable Laboratory Wind Toolkit, a dataset with 126,692 wind points in North America. The architectures designed are based on different approaches, Multi-Layer Perceptron Networks (MLP), Convolutional Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Networks (RNN). These deep learning architectures have been tested to obtain predictions in a 12-h ahead horizon, and the accuracy is measured with the coefficient of determination, the R² method. The application of the models to wind sites evenly distributed in the North America geography allows us to infer several conclusions on the relationships between methods, terrain, and forecasting complexity. The results show differences between the models and confirm the superior capabilities on the use of deep learning techniques for wind speed forecasting from wind time series data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

One Day Ahead Prediction of Wind Speed Class by Statistical Models

This paper deals with the clustering of daily wind speed time series based on two features, namely the daily average wind speed and the corresponding degree of fluctuation. Daily values of the feature pairs are first classified by means of the fuzzy c-means unsupervised clustering algorithm and then results are used to train a supervised MLP neural network classifier. It is shown that associating to a true wind speed time series a time series of classes allows performing some useful statistics. Further, the problem of predicting the class of daily wind speed 1-step ahead is addressed by using both the Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and the Non-linear Auto-Regressive (NAR) approaches. The performances of the considered class prediction models are finally assessed in terms of True Positive rate (TPR) and True Negative rate (TNR), also in comparison with the persistent model