Wind turbines play an increasingly important role in renewable power generation. To ensure the efficient production and financial viability of wind power, it is crucial to maintain wind turbines’ reliability and availability (uptime) through advanced real-time condition monitoring technologies. Given their plurality and evolution, this article provides an updated comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art condition monitoring technologies used for fault diagnosis and lifetime prognosis in wind turbines. Specifically, this article presents the major fault and failure modes observed in wind turbines along with their root causes, and thoroughly reviews the techniques and strategies available for wind turbine condition monitoring from signal-based to model-based perspectives. In total, more than 390 references, mostly selected from recent journal articles, theses, and reports in the open literature, are compiled to assess as exhaustively as possible the past, current, and future research and development trends in this substantial and active investigation area.

Wind turbines are designed to generate electrical energy as efficiently and reliably as possible. Advanced fault detection, diagnosis, and accommodation schemes are necessary to realize the required levels of reliability and availability in modern wind turbines. This paper presents two novel approaches oriented to the design of fault-tolerant control (FTC) schemes for reliable regulation of generator torque in a wind turbine that can be affected by both model uncertainties and actuator faults in its generator/converter. The first approach is based on fuzzy model reference adaptive control in which a fuzzy inference mechanism is used for parameter adaptation without any explicit knowledge of the potential faults in the system. The second approach exploits fuzzy modeling and identification method to develop an integrated model-based fault detection and diagnosis, and automatic signal correction mechanism to accommodate potential faults in the system based on online diagnostic information. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed FTC schemes is illustrated and compared by a series of simulations on a well-known large offshore wind turbine benchmark in the presence of wind turbulences, measurement noises, and realistic fault scenarios in the generator/converter torque actuator.

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.

The bearing is an essential component of a rotating machine. Sudden failure of the bearing may cause an unwanted breakdown of the manufacturing plant. In this paper, an intelligent fault diagnosis technique was developed to diagnose various faults that occur in a deep groove ball bearing. An experimental setup was designed and developed to generate faulty data in various conditions, such as inner race fault, outer race fault, and cage fault, along with the healthy condition. The time waveform of raw vibration data generated from the system was transformed into a frequency spectrum using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) method. These FFT signals were analyzed to detect the defective bearing. Another significant contribution of this paper is the application of a machine learning (ML) algorithm to diagnose bearing faults. The support vector machine (SVM) was used as the primary algorithm. As the efficiency of SVM heavily depends on hyperparameter tuning and optimum feature selection, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique was used to improve the model performance. The classification accuracy obtained using SVM with a traditional grid search cross-validation (CV) optimizer was 92%, whereas the improved accuracy using the PSO-based SVM was found to be 93.9%. The developed model was also compared with other traditional ML techniques such as k-nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). In every case, the proposed model outperformed the existing algorithms.