Wind turbine yaw control plays an important role in increasing the wind turbine production and also in protecting the wind turbine. Accurate measurement of yaw angle is the basis of an effective wind turbine yaw controller. The accuracy of yaw angle measurement is affected significantly by the problem of zero-point shifting. Hence, it is essential to evaluate the zero-point shifting error on wind turbines on-line in order to improve the reliability of yaw angle measurement in real time. Particularly, qualitative evaluation of the zero-point shifting error could be useful for wind farm operators to realize prompt and cost-effective maintenance on yaw angle sensors. In the aim of qualitatively evaluating the zero-point shifting error, the yaw angle sensor zero-point shifting fault is firstly defined in this paper. A data-driven method is then proposed to detect the zero-point shifting fault based on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data. The zero-point shifting fault is detected in the proposed method by analyzing the power performance under different yaw angles. The SCADA data are partitioned into different bins according to both wind speed and yaw angle in order to deeply evaluate the power performance. An indicator is proposed in this method for power performance evaluation under each yaw angle. The yaw angle with the largest indicator is considered as the yaw angle measurement error in our work. A zero-point shifting fault would trigger an alarm if the error is larger than a predefined threshold. Case studies from several actual wind farms proved the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting zero-point shifting fault and also in improving the wind turbine performance. Results of the proposed method could be useful for wind farm operators to realize prompt adjustment if there exists a large error of yaw angle measurement.

The wind turbine power curve (WTPC) is of great significance for wind power forecasting, condition monitoring, and energy assessment. This paper proposes a novel WTPC modelling method with logistic functions based on quantile regression (QRLF). Firstly, we combine the asymmetric absolute value function from the quantile regression (QR) cost function with logistic functions (LF), so that the proposed method can describe the uncertainty of wind power by the fitting curves of different quantiles without considering the prior distribution of wind power. Among them, three optimization algorithms are selected to make comparative studies. Secondly, an adaptive outlier filtering method is developed based on QRLF, which can eliminate the outliers by the symmetrical relationship of power distribution. Lastly, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data collected from wind turbines in three wind farms are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Five evaluation metrics are applied for the comparative analysis. Compared with typical WTPC models, QRLF has better fitting performance in both deterministic and probabilistic power curve modeling.