Application of the intrinsic time-scale decomposition method to fault diagnosis of wind turbine bearing

Abstract

A fault diagnosis method of wind turbine bearing based on intrinsic time-scale decomposition (ITD) is put forward. In the proposed method, the vibration signal of the main bearing is decomposed into several proper rotation components by the ITD method. The frequency centers of the proper rotation components that contain predominant energy are computed and considered as fault feature vectors. The nearest neighbor algorithm is applied to identify the fault types of the wind turbine bearing. The experimental data of the wind turbine spherical roller bearing in four conditions (normal, outer race fault, inner race fault and roller fault) are applied to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of this approach for the diagnosis of the wind turbine bearing faults under uncertain conditions.