Spatio-temporal fusion neural network for multi-class fault diagnosis of wind turbines based on SCADA data

Numerous sensors have been deployed in different locations in components of wind turbines to continuously monitor the health status of the turbine system and accordingly, generate a large volume of operation data by the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Naturally, these sensory data are multivariate time series with high spatio-temporal correlations. It is still challenging to effectively model such correlations and then enable an accurate fault diagnosis. To this end, we proposed a new spatio-temporal fusion neural network (STFNN) for wind turbine fault diagnosis. Specifically, a multi-kernel fusion convolution neural network (MKFCNN) with multiple convolution kernels of different sizes is first designed to extract multi-scale spatial correlations among different variables. Then, we adopt the long short-term memory (LSTM) to further learn the temporal dependence of the learned spatial features. The proposed STFNN model provides an end-to-end fault diagnosis way, which can directly learn spatio-temporal dependency from the raw SCADA data and give the fault diagnosis result. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are evaluated on a generic wind turbine benchmark simulation dataset and a SCADA dataset from a real wind farm. Both experimental results have indicated that the proposed method outperformed several compared methods.