Fault detection in blade pitch systems of floating wind turbines utilizing transformer architecture

This paper proposes a fault detection method for blade pitch systems of floating wind turbines using transformer- based deep- learning models. Transformers leverage self- attention mechanisms, efficiently process time- series data, and capture long-term dependencies more effectively than traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The model was trained using normal operational data to detect anomalies through high reconstruction losses when encountering abnormal data. In this study, various fault conditions in a blade pitch system, including environmental load cases, were simulated using a detailed model of a spar- type floating wind turbine, the data collected from these simulations were used to train and test the transformer models. The model demonstrated superior fault- detection capabilities with high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores. The results show that the proposed method successfully identifies faults and achieves high-performance metrics, outperforming existing traditional multi- layer perceptron (MLP) models and long short-term memory-autoencoder (LSTM-AE) models. This study highlights the potential of transformer models for real-time fault detection in wind turbines, contributing to more advanced condition- monitoring systems with minimal human intervention.