A Novel Deep Class-Imbalanced Semisupervised Model for Wind Turbine Blade Icing Detection

Wind energy is of great importance for future energy development. In order to fully exploit wind energy, wind farms are often located at high latitudes, a practice that is accompanied by a high risk of icing. Traditional blade icing detection methods are usually based on manual inspection or external sensors/tools, but these techniques are limited by human expertise and additional costs. Model-based methods are highly dependent on prior domain knowledge and prone to misinterpretation. Data-driven approaches can offer promising solutions but require a massive amount of labeled training data, which are not generally available. In addition, the data collected for icing detection tend to be imbalanced because, most of the time, wind turbines operate under normal conditions. To address these challenges, this article presents a novel deep class-imbalanced semisupervised (DCISS) model for estimating blade icing conditions. DCISS integrates class-imbalanced and semisupervised learning (SSL) using a prototypical network that can rebalance features and measure the similarities between labeled and unlabeled samples. In addition, a channel calibration attention module is proposed to improve the ability to extract features from raw data. The proposed model has been evaluated using the blade icing datasets of three wind turbines. Compared to the classical anomaly detection and state-of-the-art SSL algorithms, DCISS shows significant advantages in terms of accuracy. Compared to five different class-imbalanced loss functions, the proposed DCISS is competitive. The generalization and practicability of the proposed model are further verified in the use case of online estimation.