A reduced-scale test bench dedicated to electrical and mechanical faults studies in wind turbine generators

Online condition monitoring is a crucial task for wind turbine generators availability and reliability enhancement and leads to early detection of both electrical and mechanical faults. This reduces the maintenance cost and avoid catastrophic failures. The performance of any condition monitoring system should be evaluated before its implementation in a full-scale system. Therefore, the design of a reduced-scale wind turbine generator including its main subsystem components at an initial stage is important for the assessment of new methods dedicated to the detection of both electrical and mechanical faults. This paper aims to demonstrate some capabilities of a formerly designed test bench based on a wound rotor induction generator in studying the effect of both electrical and mechanical faults on its electrical signatures. This system includes all required instrumentation in addition to a real-time platform for the development of any sophisticated condition monitoring strategy devoted to the online condition monitoring of wind turbines. A reduced-scale system based on a 5.5kW wound rotor induction machine is used for the validation of the proposed approach.