Diagnosis of Mechanical Failures in Wind Turbine Generator Using Spectral Analysis

Mechanical faults in wind turbine generators lead to a huge problems of breaking electricity production, increase the maintenance cost and can damage the wind turbine generator, which caught fire in the nacelle. Gearbox installed in the nacelle is the important component in wind turbine, it composed by shafts bearings and gearings. Always bearings and gearings failures are related together. Therefore, to control these rotating components we need to analysis their vibration signature. This paper was done with Tunisian electricity and gas company (STEG) it's about bearings diagnosis which is based on three temporal vibration signals which are made by three sensors installed also in three positions axial, vertical and horizontal. In this work we present a Fast Fourier Transform which is applied on raw mechanical vibration signals, which are defined in time domain. The spectrum of this approach has shown great results of diagnostics applied on mechanical failures in wind turbine generator. This method proves a better diagnosis results using real vibration data set from vibration department of STEG.