Condition monitoring and performance forecasting of wind turbines based on denoising autoencoder and novel convolutional neural networks

With the proportion of wind power in the grid increasing, the monitoring and maintenance of wind turbines is becoming more and more important for the reliability of the grid. In this study, a data-driven modelling framework based on deep convolutional neural networks is constructed for wind turbines condition monitoring (CM) and performance forecasting (PF). For CM, a robust denoising autoencoder (DAE) model is introduced to output the reconstruction error (RE) of raw signals. The RE is processed to a state indicator by exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) and monitored on a control chart. For PF, two multi-steps ahead forecasting models are constructed for the forecasting of generator bearing and transformer temperature. To prevent overfitting caused by abundant features, the marginal effect analysis based on random forests is implemented to measure the importance of features. Besides, novel residual attention module (RAM) and training strategies are used improve their representation power of DAE and PF models. Experiments on a real wind turbine dataset prove the effectiveness of the proposed models and methods. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.