Dynamic Fault Monitoring of Pitch System in Wind Turbines using Selective Ensemble Small-World Neural Networks

Pitch system failures occur primarily because wind turbines typically work in dynamic and variable environments. Conventional monitoring strategies show limitations of continuously identifying faults in most cases, especially when rapidly changing winds occur. A novel selective-ensemble monitoring strategy is presented to diagnose the most pitch failures using Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data. The proposed strategy consists of five steps. During the first step, the SCADA data are partitioned according to the turbine’s four working states. Correlation Information Entropy (CIE) and 10 indicators are used to select correlation signals and extract features of the partition data, respectively. During the second step, multiple Small-World Neural Networks (SWNNs) are established as the ensemble members. Regarding the third step, all the features are randomly sampled to train the SWNN members. The fourth step involves using an improved global correlation method to select appropriate ensemble members while in the fifth step, the selected members are fused to obtain the final classification result based on the weighted integration approach. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed ensemble strategy shows an effective accuracy rate of over 93.8% within a short delay time.