On the use of artificial Intelligence for condition monitoring in horizontal-axis wind turbines

Wind power is one of the fastest-growing renewable energy sectors and is considered instrumental in the ongoing decarbonization process. However, wind turbines (WTs) present high operation and maintenance costs caused by inefficiencies and failures, leading to ever-increasing attention to effective Condition Monitoring (CM) strategies. Nowadays, modern WTs are integrated with sensor networks as part of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for supervision purposes. CM of wind farms through predictive models based on routinely collected SCADA data is envisaged as a viable mean of improving producibility by spotting operational inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised anomaly detection framework for wind turbine using SCADA data. It involves the use of a multivariate feature selection algorithm based on a novel Combined Power Predictive Score (CPPS), where the information content of combinations of variables is considered for the prediction of one or more key parameters. The framework has been tested on SCADA data collected from an off-shore wind farm, and the results showed that it successfully detects anomalies and anticipates major bearing failures by outperforming a recent deep neural approach.