Vibration‐based wind turbine planetary gearbox fault diagnosis using spectral averaging

Planetary gearboxes (PGBs) are widely used in the drivetrain of wind turbines. Any PGB failure could lead to a significant breakdown or major loss of a wind turbine. Therefore, PGB fault diagnosis is very important for reducing the downtime and maintenance cost and improving the safety, reliability, and lifespan of wind turbines. The wind energy industry currently utilizes vibratory analysis as a standard method for PGB condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. Among them, the vibration separation is considered as one of the well‐established vibratory analysis techniques. However, the drawbacks of the vibration separation technique as reported in the literature include the following: potential sun gear fault diagnosis limitation, multiple sensors and large data requirement, and vulnerability to external noise. This paper presents a new method using a single vibration sensor for PGB fault diagnosis using spectral averaging. It combines the techniques of enveloping, Welch's spectral averaging, and data mining‐based fault classifiers. Using the presented approach, vibration fault features for wind turbine PGB are extracted as condition indicators for fault diagnosis and condition indicators are used as inputs to fault classifiers for PGB fault diagnosis. The method is validated on a set of seeded localized faults on all gears: sun gear, planetary gear, and ring gear. The results have shown a promising PGB fault diagnosis performance with the presented method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.