Review of failures and condition monitoring in wind turbine generators

Increasing wind power generation quantity in power systems needs obviously reliable operation. Therefore, accurate condition monitoring and fault diagnosis are almost mandatory. This paper aims to report recent works on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis for wind turbine generators. Wind turbines are subjected to different sort of failures, thus before stating condition monitoring and fault diagnosis methods it is necessary to identify what kind of failures can be found in the real world. As a result, the gearbox is one of the most critical components of the wind turbine in which failures could stop generation for a long time. Recently, several condition monitoring and fault diagnosis techniques have been introduced in order to minimize downtime and maintenance cost while increasing energy availability and life time service of the wind farms. Vibration sensors have been used for long time in wind turbine condition monitoring systems to collect data of the generator health. Actually, using such sensors is expensive, difficult to install and sometimes impossible to be implemented in already installed wind turbines. Therefore, researchers have been focused on using electrical signature analysis from sensors in order to detect wind turbines faults and generator health in a cheap, easy to install and accessible way.