Health monitoring and early fault detection of wind turbines have attracted considerable attention due to the benefits of improving reliability and reducing the operation and maintenance costs of the turbine. However, dynamic and constantly changing operating conditions of wind turbines still pose great challenges to effective and reliable fault detection. Most existing health monitoring approaches mainly focus on one single operating condition, so these methods cannot assess the health status of turbines accurately, leading to unsatisfactory detection performance. To this end, this paper proposes a novel general health monitoring framework for wind turbines based on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. A key feature of the proposed framework is that it first partitions the turbine operation into multiple sub-operation conditions by the clustering approach and then builds a normal turbine behavior model for each sub-operation condition. For normal behavior modeling, an optimized deep belief network is proposed. This optimized modeling method can capture the sophisticated nonlinear correlations among different monitoring variables, which is helpful to enhance the prediction performance. A case study of main bearing fault detection using real SCADA data is used to validate the proposed approach, which demonstrates its effectiveness and advantages.

Sensor fault detection of wind turbines plays an important role in improving the reliability and stable operation of turbines. The supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of a wind turbine provides promising insights into sensor fault detection due to the accessibility of the data and the abundance of sensor information. However, SCADA data are essentially multivariate time series with inherent spatio-temporal correlation characteristics, which has not been well considered in the existing wind turbine fault detection research. This paper proposes a novel classification-based fault detection method for wind turbine sensors. To better capture the spatio-temporal characteristics hidden in SCADA data, a multiscale spatio-temporal convolutional deep belief network (MSTCDBN) was developed to perform feature learning and classification to fulfill the sensor fault detection. A major superiority of the proposed method is that it can not only learn the spatial correlation information between several different variables but also capture the temporal characteristics of each variable. Furthermore, this method with multiscale learning capability can excavate interactive characteristics between variables at different scales of filters. A generic wind turbine benchmark model was used to evaluate the proposed approach. The comparative results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly enhance the fault detection performance.