Advanced Vibration Signal Processing Using Edge Computing to Monitor Wind Turbine Drivetrains

This paper illustrates an integrated monitoring approach for wind turbines exploiting this Industry 4.0 context. Our combined edge-cloud processing approach is documented. We show edge processing of vibration data captured on a wind turbine gearbox to extract diagnostic features. Focus is on statistical indicators. Real-life signals collected on an offshore turbine are used to illustrate the concept of local processing. The NVIDIA Jet-son platform serves as edge computation medium. Furthermore, we show an integrated failure detection and fault severity assessment at the cloud level. Health assessment and fault localization combines state-of-the-art vibration signal processing on high frequency data (10kHz and higher) with machine learning models to allow anomaly detection for each processing pipeline. Again this is illustrated using data from an offshore wind farm. Additionally, the fact that data of similar wind turbines in the farm is collected allows for exploiting system similarity over the fleet.