Perspectives on condition monitoring techniques of wind turbines

The ever-increasing development of wind power plants has raised awareness that an appropriate condition monitoring system is required to achieve high reliability of wind turbines. In order to develop an efficient, accurate and reliable condition monitoring system, the operations of wind turbines need to be fully understood. This article focuses on the online condition monitoring of electrical, mechanical and structural components of a wind turbine to diminish downtime due to maintenance. Failure mechanisms of the most vulnerable parts of wind turbines and their root causes are discussed. State-of-the-art condition monitoring methods of the different parts of wind turbine such as generators, power converters, DC-links, bearings, gearboxes, brake systems and tower structure are reviewed. This article addresses the existing problems in some areas of condition monitoring systems and provides a novel method to overcome these problems. In this article, a comparison between existing condition monitoring techniques is carried out and recommendations on appropriate methods are provided. In the analysis of the technical literature, it is noted that the effect of wind speed variation is not considered for traditional condition monitoring schemes.