Entropy-Constrained M2ANet for Early Fault Prediction of Wind Turbines

Early fault prediction of wind turbines is critical for ensuring wind farm safety and reducing operation and maintenance costs. However, the latent and progressive nature of incipient faults, together with concurrent failures across multiple subsystems, makes accurate root-cause identification challenging. In addition, severe class imbalance between normal and faulty samples further degrades prediction performance, particularly for minority fault types. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel fault prediction model, M2ANet, using SCADA data within a 30-min pre-fault window. The model combines a dual-memory module with progressive dilated convolutions to efficiently capture multi-scale temporal dependencies from high-dimensional operational variables. An entropy-bias penalty is further introduced into the loss function to adaptively regularize the predicted probability distribution, alleviating overconfidence under imbalanced data conditions and improving the recognition of minority faults. Experiments on a real-world wind farm dataset show that M2ANet achieves an overall accuracy of 90.73% and a weighted F1-score of 90.62% in multi-class fault prediction, outperforming 10 representative baseline models. In addition to these aggregate metrics, per-class evaluation confirms the model’s robustness under class imbalance. Notably, for yaw system faults, which account for only 1.9% of the samples, M2ANet achieves a recall of 95.92% with a 30-min-ahead warning. These results demonstrate its effectiveness and reliability for early fault prediction in practical wind turbine applications.