Condition monitoring of a wind turbine drivetrain based on generator stator current processing

As the wind turbine operates in harsh conditions, numerous of its components are critical and present an important downtime for maintenance. In this paper, we propose a fault diagnosis algorithm to detect and locate the defects affecting the generator rotor and the pinion of the gearbox lay shaft in a real 25 kW wind turbine drivetrain. The induction generator was used as a fault sensor for gear teeth damage. Through the use of the wavelet packet transform, and the local mean decomposition combined with the Fast Fourier Transform, the detection of gear meshing frequency in the stator current reflects teeth faults. Hence, the principal component analysis of the stator current gives a suitable classification for the gearbox states under different working stages. The obtained results have been significant, despite the use of a short duration and a low sampling frequency of the experimental data.