On the Use of a Single Piezoelectric Strain Sensor for Wind Turbine Planetary Gearbox Fault Diagnosis

Planetary gearboxes (PGBs) are widely used in the drivetrain of wind turbines. Any PGB failure could lead to breakdown of the whole drivetrain and major loss of wind turbines. Therefore, PGB fault diagnosis is important in reducing the downtime and maintenance cost and improving the reliability and lifespan of wind turbines. PGB fault diagnosis has been done mostly through vibration analysis over the past years. Vibration signals theoretically have an amplitude modulation (AM) effect caused by time-variant vibration transfer paths due to the rotation of planet carrier and sun gear, and therefore, their spectral structure is complex. Strain sensor signals, on the other hand, are closely correlated to torsional vibration, which is less sensitive to the AM effect caused by rotating vibration transfer path. Thus, it is potentially easy and effective to diagnose PGB faults via stain sensor signal analysis. In this paper, a new method using a single piezoelectric strain sensor for PGB fault diagnosis is presented. The method is validated on a set of seeded localized faults on all gears, namely, sun gear, planetary gear, and ring gear. The validation results have shown a satisfactory PGB fault diagnostic performance using strain sensor signal analysis.