Fault Diagnosis Techniques for a Wind Turbine System

The fault diagnosis and prognosis of wind turbine systems represent a challenging issue, thus justifying the research topics developed in this work with application to safety-critical systems. Therefore, this chapter addresses these research issues and demonstrates viable techniques of fault diagnosis and condition monitoring. To this aim, the design of the so-called fault detector relies on its estimate, which involves data-driven methods, as they result effective methods for managing partial information of the system dynamics, together with errors, model-reality mismatch and disturbance effects. In particular, the considered data-driven strategies use fuzzy systems and neural networks, which are employed to establish non-linear dynamic links between measurements and faults. The selected prototypes are based on non-linear autoregressive with exogenous input descriptions, since they are able to approximate non-linear dynamic functions with arbitrary degree of accuracy. The capabilities of the designed fault diagnosis schemes are verified via a high-fidelity simulator, which describes the normal and the faulty behaviour of a wind turbine plant. Finally, the robustness and the reliability features of the proposed methods are validated in the presence of uncertainty and disturbance implemented in the wind turbine simulator.