Vibration analysis is an effective tool for the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of wind turbine drivetrains. It enables the defect location of mechanical subassemblies and health indicator construction for remaining useful life prediction, which is beneficial to reducing the operation and maintenance costs of wind farms. This paper analyzes the structure features of different drivetrains of mainstream wind turbines and introduces a vibration data acquisition system. Almost all the research on the vibration-based diagnosis algorithm for wind turbines in the past decade is reviewed, with its effects being discussed. Several challenging tasks and their solutions in the vibration-based fault detection of wind turbine drivetrains are proposed from the perspective of practicality for wind turbines, including the fault detection of planetary subassemblies in multistage wind turbine gearboxes, fault feature extraction under nonstationary conditions, fault information enhancement techniques and health indicator construction. Numerous naturally damaged cases representing the real operational features of industrial wind turbines are given, with a discussion of the failure mechanism of defective parts in wind turbine drivetrains as well.

Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of critical subassemblies can provide an advanced maintenance strategy for wind turbines installed in remote regions. This paper proposes a novel prognostic approach to predict the RUL of bearings in a wind turbine gearbox. An artificial neural network (NN) is used to train data-driven models and to predict short-term tendencies of feature series. By combining the predicted and training features, a polynomial curve reflecting the long-term degradation process of bearings is fitted. Through solving the intersection between the fitted curve and the pre-defined threshold, the RUL can be deduced. The presented approach is validated by an operating wind turbine with a faulty bearing in the gearbox.

Accurate remaining useful life prognosis of bearings in wind turbines can effectively help to schedule maintenance strategy and reduce operational costs at wind farms. Unscented particle filter is good at state tracking in nonlinear problem. A robust model-based approach based on improved unscented particle filter is presented to deal with bearing life prognosis in wind turbines, which involves: (1) The mean of sigma points after unscented Kalman transform is regarded as the particles in particle filter to guarantee the particles aggregation; (2) Several past measurements are utilized to estimate the likelihood function of current step; (3) Uniform distribution is adopted for resampling particles to make them diversity. The presented remaining useful life prognosis approach depends more on the measurement, rather than the initial parameters of degradation model, which makes it practicable for the on-site wind turbines. Three life-cycle bearings from wind turbine high-speed shafts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A nonlinear coupled dynamic model of a rod fastening rotor under rub-impact and initial permanent deflection was developed in this paper. The governing motion equation was derived by the D’Alembert principle considering the contact characteristic between disks, nonlinear oil-film force, rub-impact force, unbalance mass, etc. The contact effects between disks was modeled as a flexural spring with cubical nonlinear stiffness. The coupled nonlinear dynamic phenomena of the rub-impact rod fastening rotor bearing system with initial permanent deflection were investigated by the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. Bifurcation diagram, vibration waveform, frequency spectrum, shaft orbit and Poincaré map are used to illustrate the rich diversity of the system response with complicated dynamics. The studies indicate that the coupled dynamic responses of the rod fastening rotor bearing system under rub-impact and initial permanent deflection exhibit a rich nonlinear dynamic diversity, synchronous periodic-1 motion, multiple periodic motion, quasi-periodic motion and chaotic motion can be observed under certain conditions. Larger radial stiffness of the stator will simplify the system motion and make the oil whirl weaker or even disappear at a certain rotating speed. With the increase of initial permanent deflection length, the instability speed of the system gradually rises, and the chaotic motion region gets smaller and smaller. The corresponding results can provide guidance for the fault diagnosis of a rub-impact rod fastening rotor with initial permanent deflection and contribute to the further understanding of the nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the rod fastening rotor bearing system.