Bearing Fault Diagnosis for Direct-Drive Wind Turbines via Current-Demodulated Signals

Bearing faults account for a large portion of all faults in wind turbine generators (WTGs). Current-based bearing fault diagnosis techniques have great economic benefits and are potential to be adopted by the wind energy industry. This paper models the modulation effects of bearing faults on the stator currents of a direct-drive wind turbine equipped with a permanent-magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) operating with a variable shaft rotating frequency. Based on the analysis, a method consisting of appropriate current frequency and amplitude demodulation algorithms and a 1P-invariant power spectrum density algorithm is proposed for bearing fault diagnosis of variable-speed direct-drive wind turbines using only one-phase stator current measurements, where 1P frequency stands for the shaft rotating frequency of a wind turbine. Experimental results on a direct-drive wind turbine equipped with a PMSG operating in a wind tunnel are provided to verify the proposed fault diagnosis method. The proposed method is demonstrated to have advantages over the method of directly using stator current measurements for WTG bearing fault diagnosis.