Fault Detection of Wind Turbines by Subspace Reconstruction-Based Robust Kernel Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

Data collected from the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system are widely used in wind farms to detect wind turbines’ (WTs) faults. However, it is challenging to extract wind turbines’ performance trends and provide accurate alarms based on SCADA data with large operating conditions fluctuations. This article presents a fault detection frame of subspace reconstruction-based robust kernel principal component analysis (SR-RKPCA) model for wind turbines SCADA data to extract nonlinear features under discontinuous interference. First, to improve the stability of the fault detection model of wind turbines, an RKPCA method is developed to decompose the original signal, decomposed into principal component subspace and residual subspace. Second, the permutation entropy is adopted to measure the residual matrix components’ disturbance level and remove trendless noise components. Then, a combined index is developed for fault detection with the aid of the residual space matrix with trend information. Ultimately, the proposed SR-RKPCA method for wind turbine detection is verified by investigating wind turbine faults cases. The proposed method has outstanding robustness and a more vital ability to extract nonlinear features for fault detection than traditional principal component analysis (PCA)- or KPCA-based methods.