Data-driven design of robust fault detection system for wind turbines

In this paper, a robust data-driven fault detection approach is proposed with application to a wind turbine benchmark. The main challenges of the wind turbine fault detection lie in its nonlinearity, unknown disturbances as well as significant measurement noise. To overcome these difficulties, a data-driven fault detection scheme is proposed with robust residual generators directly constructed from available process data. A performance index and an optimization criterion are proposed to achieve the robustness of the residual signals related to the disturbances. For the residual evaluation, a proper evaluation approach as well as a suitable decision logic is given to make a correct final decision. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is finally illustrated by simulations on the wind turbine benchmark model. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.