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Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbine
Generators Using SCADA Data Analysis
Xiaohang Jin, Senior Member, IEEE, Zhuangwei Xu, and Wei Qiao, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Utility-scale wind turbines are equipped with a
supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for
remote supervision and control. The SCADA system accumulates
a large amount of data that contains the health conditions of the
wind turbines. Thus, it is interesting to mine the health
status-related information from SCADA data for wind turbine
condition monitoring. In this paper, an ensemble approach is
proposed to detect anomalies and diagnose faults in wind turbines.
Historical SCADA data collected from healthy wind turbines are
used to model their normal behaviors and build a Mahalanobis
space as a reference space. By comparing the predicted behavior
of the wind turbine by a trained model with the reference space,
anomalies can be detected. Finally, wind turbine faults are
diagnosed through the analysis of the distributions and
correlations of their SCADA data. The proposed approach is
validated by using the SCADA data collected from two field wind
turbines. Results show that it can detect anomalies and diagnose
the corresponding failure components before the wind turbines
have to be shut down for maintenance.
Index Terms—Condition monitoring, doubly-fed induction
generator (DFIG), fault diagnosis, supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA), wind turbine generator.
I. INTRODUCTION
W IND turbines have been widely deployed to convert wind
energy into electricity. According to a Global Wind
Energy Council report [1], the global installed wind power
capacity has reached to 591 GW in 2018. Although Vestas
scheduled to launch 10 MW wind turbines [2] and GE is
working to develop world’s largest 12 MW offshore wind
turbine [3], most utility-scale wind turbines are in the range of 1
Manuscript received May 7, 2019; revised October 9, 2019 and January 22,
2020; accepted April 8, 2020. This work was supported in part by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 51505424, and in part by
Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants
LY15E050019, and in part by Ningbo Natural Science Foundation under Grant
2018A610045, and in part by Key Laboratory of E&M (Zhejiang University of
Technology), Ministry of Education & Zhejiang Province under Grant
EM2019120104. (Corresponding author: Xiaohang Jin)
X. Jin is with the College of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University
of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China, with the Key Laboratory of E&M
(Zhejiang University of Technology), Ministry of Education & Zhejiang
Province, Hangzhou 310023, China, and also with the Ninghai ZJUT Academy
of Science and Technology, Ninghai 315600, China (e-mail:
xhjin@zjut.edu.cn).
Z. Xu is with the College of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University
of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China.
W. Qiao is with the Power and Energy Systems Laboratory, Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln,
Lincoln, NE 68588-0511 USA (e-mail: wqiao3@unl.edu).
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1
to 5 MW [4]. That’s to say, there are hundreds of thousands of
wind turbines installed in the world that require significant cost
and effort for operation and maintenance. Based on the
drivetrain configurations, wind turbines can be classified as
geared and gearless wind turbines [5]. Geared wind turbines
usually consist of the following components: a rotor with
blades, a pitch system, a yaw system, main shaft bearings, a
gearbox, a generator, a tower, and other electrical and
mechanical components [6], [7]. These components and
subsystems usually work in a harsh environment and, therefore,
are prone to failure after certain years of operation [8]. Wind
turbine failures may result in high costs for maintenance and
downtime. For example, if a 2MW onshore wind turbine
operates at 50% of the rated capacity and the electricity price is
$0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), the cost of downtime would be
$2,880 per day. The cost for repairing a failed drivetrain
component could reach to $250,000 [9]. Thus, to reduce the
costs caused by wind turbine failures, there has been a growing
interest in condition monitoring of wind turbines.
Many methods have been proposed for condition monitoring
of wind turbines [10], [23]. Commercial condition monitoring
systems (CMSs) mainly use high-resolution vibration signals
for health monitoring and fault diagnosis and prognosis of wind
turbines. However, these CMSs require installation of
additional vibration sensors and advanced signal processing
techniques to extract useful information (such as fault-related
features) from the CMS data. Oil and wear debris analysis were
also proposed to monitor lubricant conditions of wind turbines
since there are many lubricated components or subsystems in
wind turbines, such as main bearing, gearbox, generator
bearing, pitch and yaw systems, and their life are seriously
affected by lubricant conditions [24]. However, there has to
disassemble the components or enter into wind turbines to get
lubricant samples for analysis. Although the benefits of oil and
wear debris analysis techniques have been widely recognized
by the wind industry, they are offline techniques and invasive to
wind turbines being monitored [24]. These limit their
applications in online health monitoring of wind turbines.
Utility-scale wind turbines have a supervisory control and
data acquisition (SCADA) system. It contains dozens or
hundreds of signals measured from wind turbines. For example,
the SCADA systems of the wind turbines studied in this paper
measure more than 100 signals. These SCADA data contain
rich health information of wind turbines and, therefore, can be
used for condition monitoring. This does not require
installation of any additional sensors as for the vibration, oil
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TABLE I
and wear debris analysis based condition monitoring SIGNALS IN SCADA DATA FOR MODEL DEVELOPMENT
techniques [14]. As wind turbines run longer and the number of
Label Signal Unit Description
wind turbines continues to grow, a large amount of SCADA
data has been collected by the wind energy industry. SCADA r18 Power kW Generator output power
data have the characteristics of big data, such as variety, Average wind speed in
r44 Wind speed m/s
30 seconds
veracity, volume, and velocity [25]. However, it is difficult to r47 Rotor speed rpm Generator rotor speed
access these data for condition monitoring due to the lack of r48 Winding temperature o
C
Generator winding
data-sharing platform, protocols, and engagement between temperature
Drive-end bearing o Generator drive-end
research community and industry [26]. With the development r51
temperature
C
bearing temperature
of artificial intelligence technologies and big data analysis Nondrive-end bearing o Generator nondrive-end
r52 C
methods, condition monitoring of wind turbines based on the temperature bearing temperature
Temperature inside the
big SCADA data is getting more and more attention. r84 Nacelle temperature o
C
nacelle
Some approaches have been proposed to mine the useful
information in SCADA data that is related to wind turbine
health status. For example, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy 2000
interference system (ANFIS) was utilized to monitor the health

r18
1000
condition of a wind turbine using SCADA data [27]. A 0
hierarchical method based on Gaussian processes and principal
component analysis was proposed to filter out abnormal cases 20

r44
10
from the SCADA data collected from 24 wind turbines [28]. A
0
nonlinear state estimation technique was proposed to diagnose 2000
wind turbine gearbox faults using SCADA data [29]. The

r47
1000
cointegration analysis was used to detect wind turbine faults
0
based on SCADA data [30]. An improved-accuracy method 100
was proposed to predict wind turbine life by reconstructing the
r48

50
distribution of torques from SCADA data [31]. A proportional 0
hazards model was utilized to schedule maintenance strategy
for wind turbines [32]. Hence, the use of SCADA data for 40
r51

20
monitoring, diagnosing, and predicting wind turbine health 0
condition and failures is feasible and desirable. In recent years,
60
deep learning methods, such as deep neural network and 40
r52

20
convolution neural network, have also been used to analyze 0
SCADA data for health monitoring. However, these machine
learning or deep learning-based approaches have problems of 20
r84

over fitting and time-consuming [33], [34]. 0

To overcome the above problems, a new ensemble approach
based on Mahalanobis distance is proposed in this paper to
detect anomalies in wind turbine generators and then diagnose
their failure modes. The SCADA data collected from two wind
turbines in the field is used to validate the effectiveness of the
proposed approach. Results show that the proposed approach
can detect anomalies in wind turbine generators before wind
turbines are shut down for maintenance, and diagnose the failed
components inside the generators.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
introduces the SCADA data sets and the SCADA signals
selected for monitoring wind turbine generators. Section III
presents the proposed SCADA data-based condition
monitoring framework. Section IV reports validation results of
the proposed method for anomaly detection and fault diagnosis
of wind turbine generators using SCADA data. Finally,
conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. SCADA DATA SETS
The SCADA data sets are collected from pitch-controlled
wind turbines equipped with a doubly-fed induction generator
(DFIG). The SCADA system acquires many signals through
2016-01-01 2016-01-23 2016-02-15 2016-03-09 2016-03-31
Date
Fig. 1. Some typical samples of the SCADA data related to the health
condition of wind turbine generator.
the sensors, such as thermocouples, accelerometers,
anemometers, pressure transducers, and switches installed in
the wind turbines. These signals are used to assess the operating
and health conditions of the wind turbines and can be divided
into discrete signals such as those indicating the status of pitch
and yaw subsystems and converter as well as continuous
signals such as those indicating wind speed, wind direction,
temperature, pressure, voltages, and currents.
Since this paper focuses on health monitoring of wind
turbine generator, only the critical SCADA data that indicate
the condition of the generator are used. These signals are
recorded with a 5 minute interval and given in Table I. Some
typical samples of these signals are shown in Fig. 1. It shows
that the environmental conditions of the wind turbine indicated
by wind speed (r44) and nacelle temperature (r84) change
frequently. The wind turbine’s working conditions, such as the
output power (r18) and rotor speed (r47), depend on the wind

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Historical difficult to extract useful health information from these

SCADA data Healthy
healthy SCADA signals directly. To solve this problem, an ensemble
data data
Online approach is proposed to mine the health-related information
Mean, standard Monitoring
deviation data from the SCADA data.
SCADA data archiving,
Normalization
Normalization
Continous monitoring III. PROPOSED SCADA DATA-BASED CONDITION
MONITORING FRAMEWORK
Correlation The proposed wind turbine condition monitoring framework
matrix is shown in Fig. 2. In offline training stage, considering the
Mahalanobis weather conditions (wind speed, wind direction, and
Mahalanobis distance
distance
environment temperature) every day is different, one season (3
months) historical healthy SCADA data is used to build a
Johnson Yes Mahalanobis space (MS) to make comparisons. The MS
Mahalanobis space
transform includes the range of Mahalanobis distances (MDs) and other
No characteristic information such as mean and standard deviation
Properties of a
Normal distribution Counter of each feature and correlation coefficients between different
+1 sets of features/variables obtained from the data collected from
Inverse Johnson healthy wind turbines [35]. In the online monitoring stage, MDs
transform
b ≥ Counter > a Warning
of the new observed data are calculated and compared by
Yes referring to the MS to determine if anomalies have occurred
No
Threshold [36]. It should be noted that even if the wind turbine is healthy,
its MDs will not always be lower than the threshold. Such
Counter > b Fault diagnosis
Mahalanobis Yes abnormal conditions may happen due to its harsh work
space conditions and environmental noise. However, if the MDs
Note: exceed the threshold over a certain frequency in a month, a
( )
a = 1 −  (  + 3 ) n warning will be triggered and the correlations between different
(
b = 1 −  (  + 2 ) n ) features will be analyzed for fault diagnosis. Since there are
where  ( • ) is the probability density function of normal distribution with
a mean of  and a standard deviation of  . 8928 SCADA data samples per month, the values of a and b in
n is the sample number of SCADA data acquired in one month. Fig. 2 are calculated to be 12 and 203, respectively.
Fig. 2. Schematic of the proposed SCADA data-based wind turbine generator Since new SCADA data samples will provide more
condition monitoring framework.
information related to the future health status of wind turbines,
Historical a moving window with the length to be one season (3 months)
SCADA data
healthy is applied to update the oldest historical healthy SCADA data
data Online Healthy
Moving window Monitoring data
of wind turbines with the new healthy SCADA data to construct
... ... data the MS dynamically for comparing as shown in Fig. 3 [37], [38].
Mahalanobis SCADA data archiving, The algorithms of MD, and Johnson transform that is used to
distance Continous monitoring
determine the threshold in MS are briefly explained below,
Mahalanobis space
(MS) construction respectively.
Yes
within MS
A. Mahalanobis Distance
No
The MD uses a scalar quantity to represent a multivariate
Anomaly detection
and fault diagnosis system by considering the correlationships between variables
Fig. 3. Schematic of the dynamic condition monitoring framework. [35], [36]. For a healthy multivariate system that has n
oberservations of k variables x1, x2, …, xn, its mean vector x ,
standard deviation , covariance matrix S, and Pearson
speed heavily. For example, there is no power when there is no correlation coefficient matrix R can be expressed as follows.
wind or the wind speed is less than the wind turbine’s cut-in 1 n
x =  x j  , x j =  xij (1)
wind speed. Since wind turbines work in a harsh environment, 1 k n i =1
the ambient temperature will change significantly over time. 12
 1 
( )
n

 xij − x j 
2
Such changes will impact nacelle temperature (r84), and finally  =  j 1k ,  j =  (2)
lead to the changes in generator temperatures. Thus,  n − 1 i =1
1 n
( )( x )
temperatures at different positions of the generator indicated by
r48, r51, and r52 vary significantly in different working
S =  sij  , sij =
k k  xui − xi
n − 1 u =1
uj − xj (3)
conditions. To eliminate the impacts of the ambient
sij
temperature changes, generator temperatures (such as wind, R = [rij ]k k , rij = (4)
drive-end bearing, and nondrive-end bearing temperatures) sii s jj
were subtracted from nacelle temperature. However, it is

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For the ith oberservation, its MD is calculated as follows. threshold. Since the raw MDs do not follow a Normal
1
MDi = zi R −1 ziT (5)
k 6000
where

Frequency
xij − x j 4000
zi =  zij  , zij = (6)
1 k j
ziT is the transposed vector of zi; and R-1 is the inverse of the 2000
correlation coefficient matrix R.
For a new observation y of the system, its MD is calculated 0
as follows. 0 5 10 15 20 25
1 MD
MD = wR −1 wT (7) Fig. 5. Histogram of the raw MDs.
k
where w is the normalized value of the new observation y in 800
terms of the mean and variance of the healthy system expressed

Frequency
600
as follows.
yj − xj 400
w =  w j  , w j = (8)
1 k j
200
and wT is the transposed vector of w.
0
B. Johnson Transform -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6
Transf ormed MD
In the training stage of the proposed approach, the positive Fig. 6. Histogram of the transformed MDs.
MDs are calculated only for the healthy wind turbines. A
threshold is needed to determine if anomalies have occurred. In 2017-02-05
this paper, the properties of Normal distribution are used to this Threshold

Raw data
x = ( x1 , x2 , , xN )

Choose an optimized z of a standard

normal variate by using the Anderson-
Darling test and determine the percentile
P? corresponding to ζ= -3z, -z, z, 3z. Fig. 7. MDs of the 1.5 MW DFIG wind turbine in the statistic monitoring
strategy.

Let x(1), x(2), x(3) and x(4) be the percentiles

of data values corresponding to ζ= -3z, -
z, z and 3z of a standard normal variate.
Threshold
Calculate
m = x( 4 ) − x(3)
mn
n = x(2) − x(1) QR =
p2
p = x(3) − x( 2) 2017-02-05
2017-02-05
00:00:00 23:59:59

QR < 1
Yes Fig. 8. MDs and generator’s two bearings temperatures of the 1.5 MW DFIG
No
wind turbine between January 28 and February 24, 2017 in the statistic
No monitoring strategy.
QR = 1
Yes 2017-02-05

Threshold
SB distribution SL distribution SU distribution

Transformed data
y = (y ,y ,
1 2
, yN )
Fig. 4. Schematic of the Johnson Transform.
Fig. 9. MDs of the 1.5 MW DFIG wind turbine in the dynamic monitoring
strategy.
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(a) (b)
Fig. 10. Scatterplot matrix of the 1.5 MW DFIG wind turbine SCADA data showing plausible relations between wind speed, power, rotor speed, and
temperature: (a) normal condition and (b) faulty condition, where r18 is the generator output power (kW); r44 is the average wind speed in 30 seconds (m/s); r47
is the generator rotor speed (rpm); and r48-r84, r51-r84, and r52-r84 are the temperature difference between generator winding, drive-end bearing, and
nondrive-end bearing and nacelle (oC), respectively.

r18
non-Normal distribution data into Normal distribution data, is
r18
used. There are three families of distributions in Johnson
r44 r44
transform: Su distribution, SB distribution, and SL distribution.
r47 r47
Their functions are given below, respectively.
r48-r84 r48-r84 1) Su distribution
 x−ε 
y = γ + η sinh −1 
r51-r84 r51-r84
 (9)
r52-r84 r52-r84  λ 
2) SB distribution
r18

r44

r47

r48-r84

r51-r84

r52-r84
r18

r44

r47

r48-r84

r51-r84

r52-r84

 x − 
(a) (b)
y =  +  ln   (10)
Fig. 11. Pearson correlation map for features of the 1.5 MW DFIG wind   + − x 
turbine SCADA data: (a) normal condition and (b) faulty condition.
3) SL distribution
Coppers are attached to balls.  x − 
y =  +  ln   (11)
  
where x and y are the raw data and the transformed data,
respectively; γ and ε are location parameters; and η and λ are
scale parameters. The selection of the distribution in Johnson
transform depends on the value of QR, which relies on the value
of the optimized z, as shown in Fig. 3. The optimized z can be
obtained from the raw data by using the Anderson-Darling test
[40].
Fig. 12. Generator bearing ball faults.
IV. CASE STUDIES AND DISCUSSIONS
2017-02-05 The case studies reported in this section used the SCADA
2017-02-05 23:59:59
00:00:00 Threshold
data collected from two DFIG wind turbines in the field. Their
generator bearings were found broken during the maintenance.
It should be noted that no online analysis was performed for the
SCADA data. The proposed condition monitoring framework
was applied on the SCADA data offline, which aims to show
that the proposed approach can provide warning for the failures
of the wind turbines and diagnose the types of the failures
before the maintenance was performed on the wind turbines to
Fig. 13. MDs of the 1.5 MW DFIG wind turbine after repairing. replace the failed components.

distribution, the Johnson transform [39], which can transform

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TABLE II MW DFIG wind turbine between January 2016 and April 2017.
NUMBER OF SAMPLES GREATER THAN THE THRESHOLD PER MONTH
Year Month Case 1 Case 2
A generator fault was reported on February 5, 2017. In the static
2016 January 7 0 monitoring, the SCADA data collected in the first three months
February 1 3 from January to March 2016 were used to train the MS.
March 66 0 The distribution of the raw MDs is shown in Fig. 5. The raw
April 7 0
May 0 0 MDs do not follow normal distribution. With the aid of the
June 0 2 Anderson-Darling test, the optimized z is 0.35, and the QR
July 0 0 value is then calculated to be 1.06. Thus, the Su distribution is
August 0 37
September 0 0 used in Johnson transform to transform the non-Gaussian MD
Octorber 0 70 data into Gaussian data. The Gaussian distribution of the
November 2 7 transformed MDs is shown in Fig. 6. Hence, the threshold in the
December 0 401
2017 January 84 142 MS is 6.87 by using the properties of Normal distribution and
February 3124 13 inverse Johnson transformation. That is to say, if the wind
March 120 8 turbine is healthy, its MDs should be less than the threshold. If
April 8 20
May - 40
some anomalies occur in the wind turbine, its MDs will be
June - 0 larger than the threshold.
July - 13 Fig. 7 shows the MDs before February 2017, and Fig. 8
August - 1
shows the MDs and the generator’s drive end and non-drive end
September - 2
bearings temperatures between January 28 and February 24,
2017 in the static monitoring strategy. The results show that the
count of the accumulated anomalies reaches to 12 on January
Threshold 2016-12-04 28, 2017. Hence, an alarm (warning) was raised on that day by
using the proposed approach. Such warnings will be repeated
on February 1, 2, and 4, 2017. Table II reports the number of
samples per month during which the MDs are greater than the
threshold in the statistic monitoring strategy. The dynamic
condition monitoring strategy was also applied to the wind
turbine by updating the MS every month. The MDs of this wind
turbine are shown in Fig. 9. Anomalies were observed in the
Fig. 14. MDs of the 2 MW DFIG wind turbine in statistic monitoring strategy. end of January 2017 and the beginning of February 2017 since
their MDs are greater than the threshold. The count of the
accumulated anomalies reaches to 203 on February 2, 2017,
and then an alarm (fault diagnosis) was triggered on that day.
2016-12-04
There are 3124 samples outside of the MD threshold in
00:00:00
2016-12-04 February 2017. Most of them happened after February 5, 2017,
23:59:59 as shown in Fig. 13. That is to say, the proposed approach can
detect the wind turbine’s anomalies before it is shut down for
repair on February 5, 2017.
Threshold When wind turbine’s anomalies were detected, the
distributions of and correlations between different features
were analyzed for fault diagnosis. Fig. 10 shows the scatter
Fig. 15. Close up of Fig. 14 with generator’s two bearings temperatures. matrix of the features in the healthy condition and faulty
condition of the wind turbine. It can be clearly found that the
2016-12-04 distributions of the non-drive end bearing temperature (r52)
Threshold changed dramatically when the wind turbine goes wrong as
indicated by the dashed red rectangle in Fig. 10. Such changes
are quantified by the correlation coefficients analysis shown in
Fig. 11. These results indicate that the generator’s non-drive
end bearing failed, which was confirmed by the onsite
maintenance records on February 5-20, 2017. These records
indicate that bearing balls failed and their surfaces were
covered with a layer of copper as shown in Fig. 12. Such
Fig. 16. MDs of the 2 MW DFIG wind turbine in dynamic monitoring
strategy.
failures cause an increase of the internal friction of the bearing
and eventually the rise of the bearing temperature. After the
A. Case 1 failed bearing was replaced by a new one on February 20, 2017,
the wind turbine was put back into service. After that its health
In the first case study, SCADA data was collected from a 1.5
status was continuously monitored by the proposed approach

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(a) (b)
Fig. 17. Scatterplot matrix of the 2 MW DFIG wind turbine SCADA data showing plausible relations between wind speed, power, rotor speed and temperature.
(a) normal condition and (b) faulty condition, where r18 is the generator output power (kW); r44 is the average wind speed in 30 seconds (m/s); r47 is the
generator rotor speed (rpm); and r48-r84, r51-r84, and r52-r84 are the temperature difference between generator winding, drive-end bearing, and nondrive-end
bearing and nacelle (oC), respectively.

r18 r18 in March and April 2017, the repaired generator returns to
r44 r44
normal working conditions as shown in Fig. 13 and reported in
Table II.
r47 r47

r48-r84 r48-r84
B. Case 2
r51-r84 r51-r84
In the second case study, SCADA data was collected from a
2 MW DFIG wind turbine between January 2016 and
r52-r84 r52-r84
September 2017. A generator fault was reported on December 4,
r18

r44

r47

r48-r84

r51-r84

r52-r84
r18

r44

r47

r48-r84

r51-r84

r52-r84

2016. Similar to the first case study, the proposed approach

(a) (b) (both static monitoring and dynamic monitoring) was used to
Fig. 18. Pearson correlation map for features of the 2 MW DFIG wind turbine analyze the SCADA data.
SCADA data. (a) normal condition, (b) faulty condition. Fig. 14 shows the MDs of the wind turbine. Fig. 15 shows the
Deformed cage
details of Fig. 14 together with the generator’s two bearings
temperatures. It can be seen that there are no operational
SCADA data on some days in December 2016, since the wind
turbine had been shut down for repairing on these days by
referring to the on-site maintenance records. The proposed
approach raises alarms in August, October and December 2016,
since many MDs on these two mentioned months are higher
than the threshold. Table II reports the number of samples
whose MDs are greater than the threshold per month in statistic
monitoring strategy. Besides these months, the dynamic
monitoring strategy raises alarm in July 2016 as shown in Fig.
16. These show that the proposed approach can detect wind
Fig. 19. Generator bearing cage faults.
turbine anomalies before its failure.
2016-12-04
The distributions of and correlations between different
Threshold
features were also analyzed. Fig. 17 shows the scatter matrix of
the features in the healthy condition and faulty condition of the
wind turbine. It can be clearly found that the distributions of the
drive-end bearing temperature (r51) changed dramatically
when the wind turbine goes wrong as indicated by the dashed
red rectangle in Fig. 17. Such changes are also quantified by the
correlation coefficients analysis shown in Fig. 18. These results
indicate that the generator’s drive-end bearing failed, which
Fig. 20. MDs of the 2 MW DFIG wind turbine after repairing. was confirmed by the on-site repair on December 11, 2016.
Bearing cage failed and it was deformed as shown in Fig. 19.
again, as shown in Fig. 13. Although some anomalies happened

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Transactions on Sustainable Energy
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Such failures lead the bearing to work abnormally, cause an
increase of the internal friction of the bearing and eventually
the rise of the drive-end bearing temperature. After the failed
bearing was repaired on December 12, 2016, the wind turbine
was put back into service. After that its health status was
continuously monitored by the proposed approach again, as
shown in Fig. 20 and reported in Table II. Although some
anomalies happened after December 12, 2016, the wind turbine
returns to normal working conditions gradually.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, an ensemble approach is introduced to analyze
the time series SCADA data for anomaly detection and fault
diagnosis of wind turbine generator. The sampling frequency of
the SCADA data is low. Thus, it does not allow mining
abnormal features of wind turbines in the frequency domain
such as done in wind turbine CMS data. Hence, process control
methods are used to develop models for anomaly detection, and
multivariate statistical learning methods are used to analyze the
distributions of and correlations between different features to
diagnose the faults. Two DFIG wind turbines field SCADA
data were used to validate the proposed approach. Results show
that it can provide advance warning before the wind turbines
are shut down for repair and can diagnose the specific failure
components in the generator. There is no need of any faulty
data to develop the condition monitoring models, thus, the
proposed approach will be very suitable for practical
applications in health monitoring for wind turbines.
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Xiaohang Jin (M’15-SM’17) received the B.Eng. degree in mechanical
engineering from Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China, in
2003, the M.Eng. degree in power machinery and engineering from Shanghai
Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in
electronic engineering from City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China,
in 2014.
Since 2014, he has been with the Zhejiang University of Technology,
Hangzhou, China, where he is currently an Associate Professor with the
College of Mechanical Engineering. He is the author or coauthor of more than
40 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. His research
interests include intelligent manufacturing, condition monitoring, prognostics
and health management, and new energy electromechanical systems.
Zhuangwei Xu received the B.Eng. degree in mechanical engineering from the
Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China, in 2017. He is currently
working toward the master degree in the College of Mechanical Engineering,
Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China.
His research interests include condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of
wind turbines.
Wei Qiao (S’05-M’08-SM’12-F’19) received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees
in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1997
and 2002, respectively, the M.S. degree in high-performance computation for
engineered systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance, Singapore, in 2003, and
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2008.
Since August 2008, he has been with the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
(UNL), Lincoln, NE, USA, where he is currently a Professor with the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is the author or
coauthor of more than 240 papers in refereed journals and conference
proceedings and holds eight U.S. patents issued. His research interests include
renewable energy systems, smart grids, condition monitoring, power
electronics, electric motor drives, energy storage systems, and emerging
electrical energy conversion devices.
Dr. Qiao is an Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY
CONVERSION, and an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
POWER ELECTRONICS and the IEEE JOURNAL OF EMERGING AND
SELECTED TOPICS IN POWER ELECTRONICS. He was the recipient of a
2010 U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the 2010 IEEE
Industry Applications Society Andrew W. Smith Outstanding Young Member
Award.

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