A review on wind turbines gearbox fault diagnosis methods

As an renewable and clean energy of the world, wind energy has gained more and more attention and its fault diagnosis becomes more and more important. The gearbox, as the kernel component of the wind turbine system, it’s robust conditions have a great influence on the whole wind turbines system. Wind turbine gearbox has complex structure, which is usually composed of solar planetary gearbox and cylindrical gearbox. In the process of operation, various kinds of faults easily occur, resulting in serious losses. Once the wind turbine gearbox is not functioning as smoothly as it could be, it may result in large economic losses for the company and owner. At the same time, the failure rate of wind turbine gearbox has always been high because of complicated mechanic structure and special motion. Therefore, the tasks of reducing the downtime and increasing the productivity of wind turbine gearbox are urgent. This paper reviewed some research results of faults diagnosis on wind turbines gearbox, such as time-frequency analysis method, vibration based methods, nondestructive testing methods, etc. Meanwhile, this paper finds out some key problems and the channel of the resolution of the issue in order to supply some information for the further research of wind turbines gearbox.