It is widely accepted that conventional boost algorithms are of low efficiency and accuracy in dealing with big data collected from wind turbine operations. To address this issue, this paper is devoted to the application of an adaptive LightGBM method for wind turbine fault detections. To this end, the realization of feature selection for fault detection is firstly achieved by utilizing the maximum information coefficient to analyze the correlation among features in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) of wind turbines. After that, a performance evaluation criterion is proposed for the improved LightGBM model to support fault detections. In this scheme, by embedding the confusion matrix as a performance indicator, an improved LightGBM fault detection approach is then developed. Based on the adaptive LightGBM fault detection model, a fault detection strategy for wind turbine gearboxes is investigated. To demonstrate the applications of the proposed algorithms and methods, a case study with a three-year SCADA dataset obtained from a wind farm sited in Southern China is conducted. Results indicate that the proposed approaches established a fault detection framework of wind turbine systems with either lower false alarm rate or lower missing detection rate.

Aiming at the problem of class imbalance in the wind turbine blade bolts operation-monitoring dataset, a fault detection method for wind turbine blade bolts based on Gaussian Mixture Model–Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique–Gaussian Mixture Model (GSG) combined with Cost-Sensitive LightGBM (CS-LightGBM) was proposed. Since it is difficult to obtain the fault samples of blade bolts, the GSG oversampling method was constructed to increase the fault samples in the blade bolt dataset. The method obtains the optimal number of clusters through the BIC criterion, and uses the GMM based on the optimal number of clusters to optimally cluster the fault samples in the blade bolt dataset. According to the density distribution of fault samples in inter-clusters, we synthesized new fault samples using SMOTE in an intra-cluster. This retains the distribution characteristics of the original fault class samples. Then, we used the GMM with the same initial cluster center to cluster the fault class samples that were added to new samples, and removed the synthetic fault class samples that were not clustered into the corresponding clusters. Finally, the synthetic data training set was used to train the CS-LightGBM fault detection model. Additionally, the hyperparameters of CS-LightGBM were optimized by the Bayesian optimization algorithm to obtain the optimal CS-LightGBM fault detection model. The experimental results show that compared with six models including SMOTE-LightGBM, CS-LightGBM, K-means-SMOTE-LightGBM, etc., the proposed fault detection model is superior to the other comparison methods in the false alarm rate, missing alarm rate and F1-score index. The method can well realize the fault detection of large wind turbine blade bolts.

It is difficult to optimize the fault model parameters when Extreme Random Forest is used to detect the electric pitch system fault model of the double-fed wind turbine generator set. Therefore, Extreme Random Forest which was optimized by improved grey wolf algorithm (IGWO-ERF) was proposed to solve the problems mentioned above. First, IGWO-ERF imports the Cosine model to nonlinearize the linearly changing convergence factor α to balance the global exploration and local exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. Then, in the later stage of the algorithm iteration, α wolf generates its mirror wolf based on the lens imaging learning strategy to increase the diversity of the population and prevent local optimum of the population. The electric pitch system fault detection method of the wind turbine generator set sets the generator power of the variable pitch system as the main state parameter. First, it uses the Pearson correlation coefficient method to eliminate the features with low correlation with the electric pitch system generator power. Then, the remaining features are ranked by the importance of the RF features. Finally, the top N features are selected to construct the electric pitch system fault data set. The data set is divided into a training set and a test set. The training set is used to train the proposed fault detection model, and the test set is used for testing. Compared with other parameter optimization algorithms, the proposed method has lower FNR and FPR in the electric pitch system fault detection of the wind turbine generator set.

Fault diagnosis and forecasting contribute significantly to the reduction of operating and maintenance associated costs, as well as to improve the resilience of wind turbine systems. Different from the existing fault diagnosis approaches using monitored vibration and acoustic data from the auxiliary equipment, this research presents a novel fault diagnosis and forecasting approach underpinned by a support vector regression model using data obtained by the supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA) of wind turbines (WT). To operate, the extraction of fault diagnosis features is conducted by measuring SCADA parameters. After that, confidence intervals are set up to guide the fault diagnosis implemented by the support vector regression (SVR) model. With the employment of confidence intervals as the performance indicators, an SVR-based fault detecting approach is then developed. Based on the WT SCADA data and the SVR model, a fault diagnosis strategy for large-scale doubly-fed wind turbine systems is investigated. A case study including a one-year monitoring SCADA data collected from a wind farm in Southern China is employed to validate the proposed methodology and demonstrate how it works. Results indicate that the proposed strategy can support the troubleshooting of wind turbine systems with high precision and effective response.

As one of the key components of wind turbines, gearboxes are under complex alternating loads for a long time, and the safety and reliability of the whole machine are often affected by the failure of internal gears and bearings. Aiming at the difficulty of optimizing the parameters of wind turbine gearbox fault detection models based on extreme random forest, a fault detection model with extreme random forest optimized by the improved butterfly optimization algorithm (IBOA-ERF) is proposed. The algebraic sum of the false alarm rate and the missing alarm rate of the fault detection model is constructed as the fitness function, and the initial position and position update strategy of the individual are improved. A chaotic mapping strategy is introduced to replace the original population initialization method to enhance the randomness of the initial population distribution. An adaptive inertia weight factor is proposed, combined with the landmark operator of the pigeon swarm optimization algorithm to update the population position iteration equation to speed up the convergence speed and improve the diversity and robustness of the butterfly optimization algorithm. The dynamic switching method of local and global search stages is adopted to achieve dynamic balance between global exploration and local search, and to avoid falling into local optima. The ERF fault detection model is trained, and the improved butterfly optimization algorithm is used to obtain optimal parameters to achieve fast response of the proposed model with good robustness and generalization under high-dimensional data. The experimental results show that, compared with other optimization algorithms, the proposed fault detection method of wind turbine gearboxes has a lower false alarm rate and missing alarm rate.