Automatic validation of vibration signals in wind farm distributed monitoring systems

A rapid growth of wind farms as a leading renewable energy sector has compelled a number of companies to develop dedicated distributed systems of monitoring and diagnosis (SM&D). Such systems are capable of early mechanical faults detection, which prevents from costly critical repairs. Fault detection of wind turbines is based on vibration and process signals analysis. Modern SM&D are usually advanced hardware and software technological products, which on the basis of collected data are capable of continuous execution of enormous number of analyses. However, the expansion of distributed systems has disclosed new challenges accompanying the transition from a singular signal analysis to automatic interpretation of large data sets. The paper deals with the assessment of data acquisition final products, namely the correctness of vibration signals recording process. The proposed validation, which is to be implemented a priori to data analysis, is required for significant calculation of any signal features as well as for legitimate storage of raw waveforms in the system database. The latter aspect is especially important in terms of gigabytes of disk space frequently wasted for corrupted data. The paper presents a step-by-step method for automatic signal validation, which can be implemented on a personal computer. Finally, the algorithm is evaluated on a real wind turbine database.