Wind turbine fault diagnosis based on Morlet wavelet transformation and Wigner-Ville distribution

Based on the Morlet wavelet transformation and Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD), we present a wind turbine fault diagnosis method in this paper. Wind turbine can be damaged by moisture absorption, fatigue, wind gusts or lightening strikes. Due to this reason, there is an increasing need to monitor the health of these structures. Vibration analysis is the best-known technology applied in wind turbine condition monitoring, in which the time-frequency analysis techniques such as Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) are widely used. Theoretically WVD has an infinite resolution in time-frequency domain. For early wind turbine fault signals, however, there are two main difficulties in WVD analysis. One is strong noise signals in the background and the other is cross terms in WVD itself. In this paper, continuous wavelet transformation (CWT) is employed to filter useless noise in raw vibration signals, and auto terms window (ATW) function is used to suppress the cross terms in WVD. In the CWT de-noising process, the Morlet wavelet, whose shape is similar to mechanical shock signals, is chosen to perform CWT on the raw vibration signals. The appropriate scale parameter for CWT is optimized by the cross validation method (CVM). An ATW based on the Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD) spectrum is taken to be a window function to suppress the cross terms in WVD. The new method can not only remove cross terms faraway from the auto terms, but also keep high energy close to every instantaneous frequency, the virtues such as high time-frequency resolution, and good energy aggregation etc. The wind turbine gear fault diagnosis experiment results indicate that the proposed method has a good de-nosing performance and is effective in suppressing the cross terms and extracting fault feature. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.