Early fault prediction of a wind turbine using a novel ANN training algorithm based on ant colony optimization

Abstract

The technological developments in wind energy field have reduced the investment and the operation costs. For this reason, wind farms have become more popular around the world. Increasing the share of wind energy in the market has led to the need for secure, inexpensive, and effective monitoring and control approaches. In the present work, various monitoring and control tools, which are cheap and easy to implement in wind farms using existing system data are proposed. The primary purpose of this study is to offer a new methodology, i.e. an artificial neural network (ANN) design with a novel training algorithm called Antrain ANN, in order to explore the early fault detection in a wind turbine. Our case problem is the fault detection for a wind turbine. For this issue, we used real data consisting of 873 samples with 12 inputs and one output. The models used in the work try to forecast fault occurrence before 10 minutes it happens. The proposed Antrain ANN algorithm is compared with Quick Propagation, Conjugate Gradient Descent, Quasi-Newton, Limited Memory Quasi-Newton, Online Backpropagation, and Batch Back Propagation algorithms, respectively. The results have shown that the proposed novel approach has better results in the correct classification rates than other algorithms except the Quasi-Newton and Limited Memory Quasi-Newton ones.