Monitoring of wind turbines: A Bio-inspired fault tolerant approach

With increasing capacity and offshore application of wind turbines the on-line monitoring module plays a vital role in maintaining safe, reliable and cost-effective operation of wind conversion systems. In this work a novel monitoring structure for large-scale wind turbines is introduced and analyzed. The salient features of the proposed monitoring structure lie in three aspects. First, a double-sensor structure with individual pitch control module is adopted to ensure more reliable pitch load distribution and data acquisition. Second, a bio-inspired data process method with state estimation and prediction module is introduced to preprocess the large amount of data from various sensors, so as to improve the data utilization efficiency of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. Third, a fault tolerant scheme with switched control strategies is used for different modes, and thus optimizes the wind turbine operation performance. Numerical simulations demonstrate the data process flow briefly.