Fast individual harmonic extraction: An efficient tool for wind turbine condition monitoring

Increasing deployment of wind turbines requires an efficient condition monitoring system for ensuring the safety and reliability of these machines. The recent concern of power quality produced by wind turbines also calls for a valid approach to guaranteeing wind turbine power may well meet the requirements by national grid code. A number of commercial condition monitoring systems have been available today. However, they are complex in hardware and expensive in price, still unsuitable for use in large scale. Moreover, to date none of them takes into account the monitoring of power quality. In view of this, a new condition monitoring technique based on individual harmonic extraction method is researched in this paper by analyzing wind turbine electrical signals, which can be readily measured from wind turbine generator. Experiments show that the proposed method is not only sensitive to wind turbine faults, but also alert to the degradation of power quality output from wind turbine system.