Wind turbine condition monitoring based on three fitted performance curves

Abstract

Based on SCADA data, this study aims at fitting three performance curves (PCs), power curve, pitch angle curve, and rotor speed curve, to accurately describe the normal behaviour of a wind turbine (WT) for performance monitoring and identification of anomalous signals. The fitting accuracy can be undesirably affected by erroneous SCADA data. Hence, outliers generated from raw SCADA data should be removed to mitigate the prediction inaccuracy, so various outlier detection (OD) approaches are compared in terms of area under the curve (AUC) and mean average precision (mAP). Among them, a novel unsupervised SVM‐KNN model, integrated by support vector machine (SVM) and k nearest neighbour (KNN), is the optimum detector for PC refinements. Based on the refined data by the SVM‐KNN detector, several common nonparametric regressors have largely improved their prediction accuracies on pitch angle and rotor speed curves from roughly 86% and 90.6%, respectively, (raw data) to both 99% (refined data). Noticeably, under the SVM‐KNN refinement, the errors have been reduced by roughly five times and 10 times for pitch angle and rotor speed predictions, respectively. Ultimately, bootstrapped prediction interval is applied to conduct the uncertainty analysis of the optimal predictive regression model, reinforcing the performance monitoring and anomaly detection.