Fault detection of wind turbine sensors using artificial neural networks

This paper proposes a method for sensor validation and fault detection in wind turbines. Ensuring validity of sensor measurements is a significant part in overall condition monitoring as sensor faults lead to incorrect results in monitoring a system’s state of health. Although identifying abrupt failures in sensors is relatively straightforward, calibration drifts are more difficult to detect. Therefore, a detection and isolation technique for sensor calibration drifts on the purpose of measurement validation was developed. Temperature sensor measurements from the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system of a wind turbine were used for this aim. Low output rate of the measurements and nonlinear characteristics of the system drive the necessity to design an advanced fault detection algorithm. Artificial neural networks were chosen for this purpose considering their high performance in nonlinear environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively detect existence of calibration drift and isolate the exact sensor with faulty behaviour.