Wind Turbine Prototype for Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a low power wind turbine prototype. The objective is to design a system that allows to simulate faults usually encountered in high power wind turbines. A SCADA system is implemented that monitors vibration, temperature, speed, currents and voltages in the different parts of the wind turbine prototype. This SCADA system allows the application of condition monitoring techniques, fault detection and diagnosis of several wind turbine conditions. A fault tree methodology is applied to diagnose different faults. With the obtained results we can conclude that this test system allows validation of monitoring and diagnostic techniques to be applied in high power wind turbines.