on line condition monitoring system for wind turbine

Abstract: Renewable energy plays a vital role in power industry to fulfil the growing demand of power in industrial sector and other utilities. Especially the wind power industry enormously expanded during the last few years. The fast expansion of the wind power market has also come with some problems that have been reported. The objective is to increase the reliability of wind turbine in order to prevent any break down, power outages and to increase the avaibility of the wind turbine generator. The unforeseen failure of a component in a wind turbine or generator can have significant impact on the wind turbine economy; the right approach is to employ condition monitoring technique at every critical location of a wind turbine. The condition monitoring is a suitable method to prevent unplanned outages as a proactive maintenance strategy. Maintenance becomes vital for the preventation of unforeseen stoppages and complete break down of the machine in industrial facilities, their timely diagnosis and corrective measures can not be overseated. The prevention of catastrophic failures through early detection of incipient faults in the machine, increased the operational life with less failures and complete breakdown. The study report focuses on the benefits for using a condition monitoring system for early fault detection. Various conventional and latest techniques of condition monitoring including signal processing methods for vibration analysis have been discussed. A basic frame work for the future work of condition monitoring system in wind turbine is also included. As a result of the study, the infrared thermography is proposed as an online condition monitoring for wind system, a thermographical approach has been proposed as a part of this thesis work. The infrared thermography technique is proposed as an integrated condition monitoring system to be used with the existing monitoring system as a retrofit design to increase the performance of early fault detection system. Keywords: condition based maintenance, condition monitoring, maintenance system, vibration based maintenance, vibration monitoring, wind turbine condition monitoring.