Study of transfer path of wind turbine gearbox fault vibration signal based on power flow finite element method

As core components of wind power equipment, wind turbine gearboxes usually work in hostile conditions, which accounts for the increasing failure rate year by year. Therefore, the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis play a vital role in the safe operation of wind power gearboxes. Compared with ordinary gear train, wind power gearboxes have more complex transfer systems. Moreover, the vibration combination generated by multi-gears meshing and time-variant transfer paths of vibration signals increases the difficulty of wind turbine gearboxes fault diagnosis. To accurately detect the faults and analyze the fault signal transfer mechanism of planetary gearboxes, this article proposes a novel method based on power flow finite element to study transfer paths. For localized spalling of planetary gears, this article analyzes six transfer paths’ contributions of the fault signal and carries on the finite element analysis to determine the dominant transfer path. By contrast, the proposed method overcomes the problems of mutual coherence and time variance requested for traditional transfer path analysis methods and reveals the changes of energy and attenuation law. The detection of dominant transfer path will greatly promote the reveal of failure mechanism and fault feature extraction for wind turbine gearboxes, which has significant academic and engineering value.