Fault detection enhancement in wind turbine planetary gearbox via stationary vibration waveform data

Abstract

Planetary gearbox fault diagnosis is very important for reducing the downtime, maintenance cost, and for improving the safety, reliability, and lifespan of wind turbines. The present work reports the results concluded by long-term experiments to a defected planetary gearbox system, with a transverse cut with a depth of 1.0 mm and thickness of 0.2 mm to simulate the planetary gearbox component crack. For each defect, recordings every 60.0 min were acquired and a total of 7 recordings (∼ 6.0 h of test duration) were resulted until the termination of the test. Fault is assured by increasing the test period to the point of where the remaining metal in the tooth area has enough stress to be in the plastic deformation region. An experimental procedure is developed to assess the severity of the gearbox component fault. Gearbox components faults of cracked planet gear tooth, cracked planet gears carrier, and cracked main bearing inner race were tested under accelerated fault conditions, where a comparative analysis of condition monitoring indicators for various crack detection has been done. The experimental localized fault signals (vibration acceleration signals) were subjected to the same diagnostic techniques such as spectrum comparisons, spectral kurtosis analysis, skewness analysis, and crest factor analysis. The method is validated on a set of seeded localized faults on all gears and components: sun gear, ring gear, etc. The results look promising, where the root mean square value analysis could be a good indicator when compared with the other indicators in terms of early detection and characterization of faults.

Comparison of New Anomaly Detection Technique for Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring Using Gearbox SCADA Data

“…The anomaly score could be seen to strongly trend upwards before failure. Abouel-seoud [9] examined time domain features for vibration data measured from a test rig gearbox. This test rig had faults introducted artificially to it, and one second measurements were taken six times over 7 h. The trend of the time domain features was examined and it was found the root mean square (RMS) of the signal showed a trend upwards towards failure for all cases considered.…”

Managing Wind Turbine Generators with a Profit Maximized Approach

“…The utility of a digital twin for WTG is for example demonstrated by [22]. Self-learning systems based on sensor data should be part of the digital twin as demonstrated by [23][24][25]. The possibility to use a digital twin to estimate RUL of a WTG component is demonstrated by [26].…”

Vibration characteristics of flexible spur ring gears using different connection types

“…In general, the ring gear is connected to the outer frame of the system. 1,2 To reduce the weight and improve the load distribution, a thin-walled ring gear is used in most planetary gear sets. 3,4 With the development of high-speed, high-load, and lightweight planetary gear sets, the meshing excitation frequency of the planetary gear set can easily approach or coincide with a high-order natural frequency of the thin-walled ring gear, thus causing greater vibration and noise.…”