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Current-Based Diagnosis For Gear Tooth Breaks In Wind Turbine Gearboxes, Dingguo Lu, Xiang Gong, Wei Qiao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Gearbox faults constitute a significant portion of all faults and downtime in wind turbines (WTs). Current-based gearbox fault diagnosis has significant advantages over traditional vibration-based techniques in terms of cost, implementation, and reliability. This paper derives a mathematical model for a WT drive train consisting of a twostage gearbox and a permanent magnet (PM) generator, from which the characteristic frequencies of gear tooth breaks in generator stator current frequency spectra are clearly identified. A adaptive signal resampling algorithm is proposed to convert the variable fault characteristic frequencies to constant values for WTs running at variable speeds. A fault detector is …