Communication network for remote monitoring of wind turbine based on infrared camera

Recently, numerous monitoring techniques have been proposed to detect the failure of wind turbine (WT). These techniques were developed based on embedded system with several sensors and complex cabling requirements. Therefore, an Infrared (IR)-camera can be considered an effective visual tool with a large coverage area, high accuracy, reliability, and cost effectiveness. This paper proposes communication network architecture for remote monitoring of WT based on non-contact IR-cameras to detect the failures in real-time. Firstly, the feasibility study of various components such as electrical, mechanical and control system of WT which can be monitored through IR-camera was conducted. According to the feasibility study, the WT components are then prioritized into three different categories of high, low, and medium. According to the aforementioned categorization of WT components, three different types of IR-camera with a low, medium, and high resolution are used. The communication network is designed in two parts the internal communication network inside the WT and the external communication network between WT and remote control center. The amount of data traffic is numerically modeled with different parameters such as image resolutions, frame size, frame number, and data rates for the transmission of data. Since, the external communication network is usually shared by other sub-networks for different applications. This can lead the problem of high bandwidth demand and security issues. Therefore, different compression techniques such as MPEG-2 and H.264 are considered to evaluate the network performance. The communication network is modeled and simulated through OPNET. The simulation results show that the end-to-end delay of the IR-camera based monitoring can satisfy the IEEE 1646 standard timing requirements.