Engineering Commons^™

Imbalance Fault Detection Of Direct-Drive Wind Turbines Using Generator Current Signals, Xiang Gong, Wei Qiao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Imbalance faults constitute a significant portion of all faults in wind turbine generators (WTGs). WTG imbalance fault detection using generator current measurements has advantages over traditional vibration-based methods in terms of cost, implementation, and system reliability. However, there are challenges in using current signals for imbalance fault detection due to low signal-to-noise ratio of the useful information in current signals and non-stationary characteristic frequencies of imbalance faults. This paper proposes a method of using generator stator currents for imbalance fault detection of direct-drive WTGs. In the proposed method, the variable shaft rotating frequency of a WTG is estimated from one …