Development of a Control and Monitoring Platform Based on Fuzzy Logic for Wind Turbine Gearboxes

Abstract

It is preferable that control and bearing condition monitoring are integrated, as the condition of the system should influence control actions. As wind turbines mainly work in remote areas, it becomes necessary to develop a wireless platform for the control system. A fuzzy system with self-tuning mechanism was developed. The input speed error and speed change were selected to control the shaft speed, while the kurtosis and peak-to-peak values were used as another set of inputs to monitor the bearing conditions. To enhance effectiveness, wait-and-see (WAS) logic was used as the pre-processing step for the raw vibration signal. The system was implemented on the LabVIEW platform. Experiments have shown that the system can effectively adjust motor rotating speed in response to bearing conditions. For future studies, more advanced fault detection methods can be integrated with proper tuning mechanisms to enrich the performance and function of the controller.