Comparative analysis of novel data-driven techniques for remaining useful life estimation of wind turbine high-speed shaft bearings

Abstract

As the global momentum for wind power generation accelerates, the industry faces substantial challenges due to premature failures in wind turbine components. These failures, particularly in critical elements like the high-speed shaft bearing, lead to significant operational losses, including unplanned downtime and elevated maintenance costs. To mitigate these issues, it's crucial to have precise predictions of the remaining useful life (RUL) of these components, enabling timely interventions and more efficient maintenance schedules. This article proposes advanced, data-driven approaches for estimating the RUL of wind turbine high-speed shaft bearings, utilizing cutting-edge techniques such as long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), gated recurrent units (GRU), and random forest (RF) algorithms. Our analysis leverages vibration data from a 2 MW wind turbine equipped with a 20-tooth pinion gear, providing a thorough validation and comparison of these methodologies against traditional models. Our results reveal that the LSTM and BiLSTM models excel in both accuracy and computational efficiency for predicting RUL and enhancing system prognosis, surpassing the performance of conventional RF and GRU methods. This research underscores the potential of our innovative data-driven strategies to develop effective RUL estimation algorithms, significantly advancing wind turbine proactive operation and maintenance operations.