The FuTure oF Wind Turbine diagnosTics

Wind energy is undergoing expansion, and it is bound to grow to a commercial/consumer level in the decades to come. This growth has materialized in the form of large-scale wind farms, wind energy cooperatives, wind turbines owned by individual investors, and multinational exploration of remote sites and offshore locations. Despite the increasing rated capacity of wind turbines, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs remain high due to failures of wind turbine components such as gearboxes and blades. To make matters worse, in spite of several drawbacks associated with current/traditional maintenance practices, almost all industries are still following them. Thus, there is a great need to educate managers of such firms about the economic justification of performance monitoring in the wind industry, which is currently characterized by high maintenance costs. The SCADA system installed at each wind turbine contains information about various turbine parameters, including all kinds of errors encountered by the system. Knowledge of wind turbine parameters and their impact on turbine components can be used in planning cost-effective maintenance activities [1-3]. Currently, with the availability and use of SCADA data, and hence the accessibility of a vast amount of historical data, the first step of cost-effective maintenance—e.g., the knowledge of past parameters of wind turbines—is relatively easy. By extracting the knowledge from this data, money can be saved by predicting and evaluating the faults of turbines and correctly maintaining the As wind turbines increase in size, and their operating conditions become more extreme, a number of current and future tribological challenges exist.