The development and application of marine current energy are attracting more and more attention around the world. Due to the hardness of its working environment, it is important and difficult to study the fault diagnosis of a marine current generation system. In this paper, an underwater image is chosen as the fault-diagnosing signal, after different sensors are compared. This paper proposes a diagnosis method based on the sparse autoencoder (SA) and softmax regression (SR). The SA is used to extract the features and SR is used to classify them. Images are used to monitor whether the blade is attached by benthos and to determine its corresponding degree of attachment. Compared with other methods, the experiment results show that the proposed method can diagnose the blade attachment with higher accuracy.

Marine current energy as a kind of renewable energy has gradually attracted more and more attention from many countries. However, the blade imbalance fault of marine current turbines (MCTs) will have an effect on the power production efficiency and cause damage to the MCT system. It is hard to classify the severity of an MCT blade imbalance fault under the condition of the current instability and seafloor noise. This paper proposes a fault classification method based on the combination of variational mode decomposition denoising (VMD denoising) and screening linear discriminant analysis (S-LDA). The proposed method consists of three parts. Firstly, phase demodulation of the collected stator current signal is performed by the Hilbert transform (HT) method. Then, the obtained demodulation signal is denoised by variational mode decomposition denoising (VMD denoising), and the denoised signal is analyzed by power spectral density (PSD). Finally, S-LDA is employed on the power signal to determine the severities of fault classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results under different severities of blade imbalance fault. The stator current signatures of experiments with different severities of blade imbalance fault are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The fault classification accuracy is 92.04% based on the proposed method. Moreover, the experimental results verify that the influence of velocity fluctuation on fault classification can be eliminated.

Marine current energy is attracting more and more attention in the world as a reliable and highly predictable energy resource. However, conventional proportional integral (PI) control will be sensitive to the numerous challenges that exist in a marine current turbine system (MCTs) such as marine current disturbance, torque disturbance and other uncertain parameters. This paper proposes a fuzzy adaptive backstepping control (F-A-BC) approach for a marine current turbine system. The proposed F-A-BC strategy consisted of two parts. First, an adaptive backstepping control approach with the compensation of disturbance and uncertainty was designed to improve anti-interference of the MCT so that the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) was realized. Then, a fuzzy logic control approach was combined to adjust parameters of an adaptive backstepping control approach in real time. The effectiveness of the proposed controller was verified by the simulation of a direct-drive marine current turbine system. The simulation results showed that the F-A-BC has better anti-interference ability and faster convergence compared to the adaptive backstepping control, sliding mode control and fuzzy PI control strategies under disturbances. The error percentage of rotor speed could be reduced by 3.5% under swell effect compared to the conventional controller. Moreover, the robustness of the F-A-BC method under uncertainties was tested and analyzed. The simulation results also indicated that the proposed approach could slightly improve the power extraction capability of the MCTs under variable marine current speed.

The conversion of marine current energy into electricity with marine current turbines (MCTs) promises renewable energy. However, the reliability and power quality of marine current turbines are degraded due to marine biological attachments on the blades. To benefit from all the information embedded in the three phases, we created a fault feature that was the derivative of the current vector modulus in a Concordia reference frame. Moreover, because of the varying marine current speed, fault features were non-stationary. A transformation based on new adaptive proportional sampling frequency (APSF) transformed them into stationary ones. The fault indicator was derived from the amplitude of the shaft rotating frequency, which was itself derived from its power spectrum. The method was validated with data collected from a test bed composed of a marine current turbine coupled to a 230 W permanent magnet synchronous generator. The results showed the efficiency of the method to detect an introduced imbalance fault with an additional mass of 80–220 g attached to blades. In comparison to methods that use a single piece of electrical information (phase current or voltage), the fault indicator based on the three currents was found to be, on average, 2.2 times greater. The results also showed that the fault indicator increased monotonically with the fault severity, with a 1.8 times-higher variation rate, as well as that the method is robust for the flow current speed that varies from 0.95 to 1.3 m/s.

Grid-connected inverters are the core equipment for connecting marine energy power generation systems to the public electric utility. The variation of current sensor fault severity will make fault samples multimodal. However, linear discriminant analysis assumes that the same fault is independent and identically distributed. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a layering linear discriminant analysis method based on traditional linear discriminant analysis. The proposed method divides the historical fault data based on the sensor fault severity layer-by-layer until the distribution of the same fault category in each subset is very close. Linear discriminant analysis is used to analyze historical fault data in each subgroup, and the kappa coefficient is applied as the basis for ending the training process. A BP neural network is employed to estimate the fault severity during the testing process, and the fault diagnosis sub-model is selected. The proposed method enables the accurate diagnosis of faults with different distributions in the same category and provides an accurate estimate of the sensor’s fault severity degree. The estimated value of the sensor’s fault degree can provide critical information for the maintenance of the equipment and can be used to correct the sensor’s output.