A Novel Diagnostic Feature for a Wind Turbine Imbalance Under Variable Speed Conditions

Dependency between the conventional imbalance diagnostic feature and the shaft rotational speed makes imbalance diagnosis challenging for variable-speed machines. This paper focuses on an investigation of this dependency and on a proposal for a novel imbalance diagnostic feature and a novel simplified version for this feature, which are independent of shaft rotational speed. An equivalent mass–spring–damper system is investigated to find a closed-form expression describing this dependency. By normalizing the conventional imbalance diagnostic feature by the obtained dependency, a diagnostic feature is proposed. By conducting comprehensive experimental trials with a wind turbine with a permissible imbalance, it is justified that the proposed simplified version of imbalance diagnostic feature is speed-invariant.