Machine Learning for Wind Turbine Fault Prediction through the Combination of Datasets from Same Type Turbines

Abstract

Abstract. Early fault detection in wind turbines is key to reduce both costs and uncertainty in the generation of energy and operation of these structures. The isolation of many wind farms, especially those offshore, makes scheduled maintenance very costly and on many occasions inefficient. In addition, the downtime of these structures is typically long and a predictive solution is much needed to 1) help prepare for the maintenance procedure beforehand, for instance to avoid delays when waiting for the required resources and components for maintenance to be available and, 2) avoid the possibility of more destructive system failures. Predicting failures in such complex systems requires modeling of multiple components in isolation and as a whole. Physics-based and data-based models are used for this purpose, which have been proven useful in this regard. Specifically, Machine Learning algorithms are proven to be a valuable resource in a wide range of problems in this industry, however a solution capable of accurately predicting the range of faults of a particular type of wind turbine is still a challenge. In this paper, we will introduce the capabilities of machine learning for wind turbine fault prediction, as well as a technique to predict different types of faults. We will compare the performance of two well established machine learning algorithms (namely K-Nearest Neighbour and Random Forest classifiers) on real wind turbine data which have produced great levels of prediction accuracy. We also propose data augmentation methods to help enhance the training of ML models when wind turbine data is scarce by merging data from turbines of the same type.