Vibration Analysis and Time Series Prediction for Wind Turbine Gearbox Prognostics

Multiple premature failures of a gearbox in a wind turbine pose a high risk of increasing the operational and maintenance costs and decreasing the profit margins. Prognostics and health management (PHM) techniques are widely used to assess the current health condition of the gearbox and project it in future to predict premature failures. This paper proposes such techniques for predicting gearbox health condition index extracted from the vibration signals. The progression of the monitoring index is predicted using two different prediction techniques, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX). The proposed prediction techniques are evaluated through sun-spot dataset and applied on vibration based health related monitoring index calculated through psychoacoustic phenomenon. A comparison is given for their prediction accuracy. The results are helpful in understanding the relationship of machine conditions, the corresponding indicating features, the level of damage/degradation, and their progression.