Assessment and Validation of Oil Sensor Systems for On-line Oil Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbine Gearboxes

Abstract

The gearbox oil and the wind turbine gearbox condition are correlated. The oil can give the wind turbine operator the necessary information to plan maintenance and avoid costly repairs. Therefore, a test bench that can reproduce the gearbox operating conditions would be necessary to test oil-sensors. This paper presents a first testing approach using a Highly Accelerated Life Test / Highly Accelerated Stress Screening test chamber. It allows assessing the performance of oil properties sensors under extreme ambient temperature and vibration levels, based on measurements from a wind turbine gearbox. Results from a test on an oil properties sensor are presented and discussed

Monitoring the Oil of Wind-Turbine Gearboxes: Main Degradation Indicators and Detection Methods

“…An oil sensor test bench, which is described in [62], was used to carry out the measurements with two oil properties sensors of the same manufacturer. The oil sensor test bench allows for analyzing the detection capability and quality of different types of sensors.…”

Fast–ICA for Mechanical Fault Detection and Identification in Electromechanical Systems for Wind Turbine Applications

“…Once PCA achieved, the whitening matrix denoted U is calculated by the following expression (8) Finally, this steps results in the matrix composed of whitened mixtures, denoted V, is obtained by (9) B. Processing Step: Implementation of the "Fast-ICA " fixed point algorithm The ICA method defines a separation model in order to estimate the sources ̂ given the whitened mixtures ̂ (10) Therefore, the goal of the ICA subsequently is to estimate W T , called the whitened separation matrix.In particular, the Fast-ICA estimates the independent components by maximizing the non-gaussianity, defined as the opposite of the deviation of this signal distribution relatively to a gaussian signal distribution of the same power.…”

“…And, then, the obtained whitening matrix U expressed in (8) based on D and E ( ) (26) Therefore, the whitened mixtures V is the projection of X into U, as shown in equation (9). These resulting mixtures V are more appropriate for the source separation than the original mixtures X.…”

“…That is why, several diagnostic techniques for the fault detection in these speed multipliers have been developed. These techniques include: Analysis of acoustic emissions [7], [8], oil analysis [9], [11] and specifically vibratory analysis. In particular, the investigation of vibratory signals has been proposed in different works, using different approaches: statistical analysis [10]- [11], temporal and/or frequency domain [7], [12], [13].…”

Preventive replacement for systems with condition monitoring and additional manual inspections

“…In some cases CM can be continuous, such as where online sensors are used to continuously provide information about the system condition. However, the majority of CM in industries such as vibration or oil monitoring is periodic (Bajric, Sprecic, & Zuber, 2011;Coronado & Kupferschmidt, 2014;Liu, Ling, & Gribonval, 2002;Luo et al, 2000;Muszynska, 1995;Newell, 1999;Nikolaou & Antiadis, 2002). Assumption 3 is the definition of the delay-time concept, which has been used extensively (Wang, 2012).…”