Distribution recurrence plots and measures: Effective signal analysis tools for fault diagnosis of wind turbine drivetrain system

Abstract

• A methodology is developed to mine the dynamics of vibrations signals for wind turbine drivetrain system fault diagnosis. • An effective visualization technique namely distribution recurrence plots is originally designed to reveal intrinsic dynamic changes of vibration signal. • A new quantifier pattern entropy is proposed for feature extraction. • The proposed method can be extended to identify various wind turbine drivetrain system faults. Extracting sensitive information from vibration signal has become a frequently adopted way in fault diagnosis. However, most previous methods fragmented the relationship between quantification and visualization analysis, which affects the interpretability, accuracy and comprehensiveness of the extracted information. To this end, this paper proposes distribution recurrence plots (DRP) and measures (DRM) to realize the unity of visualization and quantification analysis of the signals. Specifically, DRP is a novel feature graphical representation method following the thought of symbolic dynamics. Derived from DRP, DRM is developed containing four quantifiers for extracting comprehensive fault features that allows a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) to identify the fault types of wind turbine drivetrain system (WTDS). Specially in DRM, pattern entropy is a newly designed quantifier by considering pattern distribution to obtained more accurate quantitative representation of the signals. Using simulated data, DRP and DRM are validated to reveal the intrinsic structural changes for different dynamic systems and robustness to noise. Applications on wind turbine gearbox illustrate that the proposed method has favorable diagnosis performance and stability compared with other competitors. This approach is easy to interpret, is robust to noise, and has a low computational burden, becoming viable for WTDS fault diagnosis.