Fault Diagnosis in Wind Turbine Planetary Gearbox Using Vibration Time-Frequency Analysis Technique

Abstract

Fault diagnosis for wind turbine planetary gearboxes is an important task for reducing their maintenance cost.In this paper, a method for the trouble diagnosis of the wind turbine gearbox, planet gear and faults is proposed, where the vibration signature was applied in which the time-frequency analysis technique such as continuous wavelet transformation was employed.A test rig was set up to simulate the working of a wind turbine planetary gearbox.The faults considered are tooth crack, tooth spalling and tooth breakage which was tested under accelerated fault conditions where the filtering process of the time signals was applied to the vibrations of gears to indicate the existence and develop of the fault.The indicator of the diagnostic technique; namely spectral kurtosis is used for the filtered vibration signals.The results demonstrate that the proposed technique has a good de-noising overall performance and is located to be very effective in the detection of signs and symptoms from vibration alerts of a gearbox with early tooth faults.