Sensor selection based on principal component analysis for fault detection in wind turbines

Growing interest for improving the reliability of safety-critical structures, such as wind turbines, has led to the advancement of structural health monitoring (SHM). Existing techniques for fault detection can be broadly classified into two major categories: model-based methods and signal processing-based methods. This work focuses in the signal-processing-based fault detection by using principal component analysis (PCA) as a way to condense and extract information from the collected signals. In particular, the goal of this work is to select a reduced number of sensors to be used. From a practical point of view, a reduced number of sensors installed in the structure leads to a reduced cost of installation and maintenance. Besides, from a computational point of view, less sensors implies lower computing time, thus the detection time is shortened. The overall strategy is to firstly create a PCA model measuring a healthy wind turbine. Secondly, with the model, and for each fault scenario and each possible subset of sensors, it measures the Euclidean distance between the arithmetic mean of the projections into the PCA model that come from the healthy wind turbine and the mean of the projections that come from the faulty one. Finally, it finds the subset of sensors that separate the most the data coming from the healthy wind turbine and the data coming from the faulty one. Numerical simulations using a sophisticated wind turbine model (a modern 5MW turbine implemented in the FAST software) show the performance of the proposed method under actuators (pitch and torque) and sensors (pitch angle measurement) faults of different type: fixed value, gain factor, offset and changed dynamics.Postprint (published version

Vibration-Based structural health monitoring using piezoelectric transducers and parametric t-SNE

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the so-called parametric t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (P-t-SNE), comparing it to the performance of the t-SNE, the non-parametric version. The methodology used in this study is introduced for the detection and classification of structural changes in the field of structural health monitoring. This method is based on the combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and P-t-SNE, and it is applied to an experimental case study of an aluminum plate with four piezoelectric transducers. The basic steps of the detection and classification process are: (i) the raw data are scaled using mean-centered group scaling and then PCA is applied to reduce its dimensionality; (ii) P-t-SNE is applied to represent the scaled and reduced data as 2-dimensional points, defining a cluster for each structural state; and (iii) the current structure to be diagnosed is associated with a cluster employing two strategies: (a) majority voting; and (b) the sum of the inverse distances. The results in the frequency domain manifest the strong performance of P-t-SNE, which is comparable to the performance of t-SNE but outperforms t-SNE in terms of computational cost and runtime. When the method is based on P-t-SNE, the overall accuracy fluctuates between 99.5% and 99.75%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Autoaprenentage i autoavaluació en les noves assignatures de matemàtiques dins del marc del sistema ECTS en l'entorn AteneaLabs

Peer Reviewe

Validation Procedures. Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) and k-fold cross-validation

2019/202

Statistical inference and parameter estimation. Maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian inference, bootstrapping

2019/202

Wind turbine condition monitoring strategy through multiway PCA and multivariate inference

This article states a condition monitoring strategy for wind turbines using a statistical data-driven modeling approach by means of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. Initially, a baseline data-based model is obtained from the healthy wind turbine by means of multiway principal component analysis (MPCA). Then, when the wind turbine is monitorized, new data is acquired and projected into the baseline MPCA model space. The acquired SCADA data are treated as a random process given the random nature of the turbulent wind. The objective is to decide if the multivariate distribution that is obtained from the wind turbine to be analyzed (healthy or not) is related to the baseline one. To achieve this goal, a test for the equality of population means is performed. Finally, the results of the test can determine that the hypothesis is rejected (and the wind turbine is faulty) or that there is no evidence to suggest that the two means are different, so the wind turbine can be considered as healthy. The methodology is evaluated on a wind turbine fault detection benchmark that uses a 5 MW high-fidelity wind turbine model and a set of eight realistic fault scenarios. It is noteworthy that the results, for the presented methodology, show that for a wide range of significance, a in [1%, 13%], the percentage of correct decisions is kept at 100%; thus it is a promising tool for real-time wind turbine condition monitoring.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Damage diagnosis for offshore fixed wind turbines

This paper proposes a damage diagnosis strategy to detect and classify different type of damages in a laboratory offshore-fixed wind turbine model. The proposed method combines an accelerometer sensor network attached to the structure with a conceived algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) with quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). The paradigm of structural health monitoring can be undertaken as a pattern recognition problem (comparison between the data collected from the healthy structure and the current structure to diagnose given a known excitation). However, in this work, as the strategy is designed for wind turbines, only the output data from the sensors is used but the excitation is assumed unknown (as in reality is provided by the wind). The proposed methodology is tested in an experimental laboratory tower modeling an offshore-fixed jacked-type wind turbine. The obtained results show the reliability of the proposed approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Elements bàsics de l'àlgebra lineal. Problemes per a la ciència de dades

Postprint (published version

The publication of press releases as journalistic information. Comparative study of two Spanish newspapers

La distinción de lo que constituye un “evento noticiable” puede dar lugar a muchas interpretaciones. En este mundo de accesibilidad telemática, que es una consecuencia de la globalización, los eventos y los sucesos de todo tipo se pueden clasificar como noticias simplemente vistiéndolos como noticias. De acuerdo con los manuales de estilo y comunicación, la noticia tiene características propias: relevancia, interés social y proximidad, entre otras. Los comunicados de prensa se han perfeccionado como resultado de las agencias de relaciones públicas cada vez más sofisticadas, y con ellas la línea delgada entre la información y la publicidad ahora está borrosa. En este artículo, comparamos comunicados de prensa emitidos por empresas públicas y privadas con breves publicados en las secciones de economía de los periódicos. Como se verá, muchos de ellos coinciden y tienen algunas similitudes. La muestra utiliza breves publicados durante el primer semestre de 2014 en El Mundo y La Vanguardia, los periódicos en español de pago por lectura que ocupan un lugar destacado en el análisis del Estudio General de Medios. La metodología hace uso del programa Maple con su comando DetectPlagiarism para realizar una comparación ad hoc de los textos. El umbral de copia predeterminado para DetectPlagiarism es 0.35. Los índices de similitud entre los breves y los comunicados de prensa de La Vanguardia y El Mundo indican valores superiores a este umbral.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A frequency-based approach for the detection and classification of structural changes using t-SNE

This work presents a structural health monitoring (SHM) approach for the detection and classification of structural changes. The proposed strategy is based on t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), a nonlinear procedure that is able to represent the local structure of high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional space. The steps of the detection and classification procedure are: (i) the data collected are scaled using mean-centered group scaling (MCGS); (ii) then principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the data set; (iii) t-SNE is applied to represent the scaled and reduced data as points in a plane defining as many clusters as different structural states; and (iv) the current structure to be diagnosed will be associated with a cluster or structural state based on three strategies: (a) the smallest point-centroid distance; (b) majority voting; and (c) the sum of the inverse distances. The combination of PCA and t-SNE improves the quality of the clusters related to the structural states. The method is evaluated using experimental data from an aluminum plate with four piezoelectric transducers (PZTs). Results are illustrated in frequency domain, and they manifest the high classification accuracy and the strong performance of this method.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version