The ever increasing size of wind turbines and the move to build them offshore have accelerated the need for optimised maintenance strategies in order to reduce operating costs. Predictive maintenance requires detailed information on the condition of turbines. Due to the high costs of dedicated condition monitoring systems based on mainly vibration measurements, the use of data from the turbine supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is appealing. This review discusses recent research using SCADA data for failure detection and condition monitoring (CM), focussing on approaches which have already proved their ability to detect anomalies in data from real turbines. Approaches are categorised as (i) trending, (ii) clustering, (iii) normal behaviour modelling, (iv) damage modelling and (v) assessment of alarms and expert systems. Potential for future research on the use of SCADA data for advanced turbine CM is discussed.

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This paper discusses the results of an extensive investigation to assess the added value of various techniques of health monitoring to optimize the maintenance procedures of offshore wind farms. This investigation was done within the framework of the EU funded Condition Monitoring for Offshore Wind Farms (CONMOW) project, which was carried out from 2002 to 2007. A small wind farm of five turbines has been instrumented with several condition monitoring systems and also with the “traditional” measurement systems for measuring mechanical loads and power performance. Data from vibration and traditional measurements, together with data collected by the turbine’s system control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, have been analyzed to assess (1) if failures can be determined from the different data sets; (2) if so, if they can be detected at an early stage and if their progress over time can be monitored; and (3) if criteria are available to assess the component’s health. Several data analysis methods and measurement configurations have been developed, applied, and tested. This paper first describes the use of condition monitoring if condition based maintenance is going to be applied instead of only scheduled and corrective maintenance. Second, the paper describes the CONMOW project and its major results, viz., the assessment of the usefulness and capabilities of condition monitoring systems, including algorithms for identifying early failures. Finally, the economic consequences of applying condition monitoring systems have been quantified and assessed.