Representational Learning for Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Equipment: A Multi-Layered Extreme Learning Machines Approach

Zhi-Xin Yang, Xian-Bo Wang and Jian-Hua Zhong
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Zhi-Xin Yang: Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China
Xian-Bo Wang: Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China
Jian-Hua Zhong: Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR 999078, China

Energies, 2016, vol. 9, issue 6, 1-17

Abstract: Reliable and quick response fault diagnosis is crucial for the wind turbine generator system (WTGS) to avoid unplanned interruption and to reduce the maintenance cost. However, the conditional data generated from WTGS operating in a tough environment is always dynamical and high-dimensional. To address these challenges, we propose a new fault diagnosis scheme which is composed of multiple extreme learning machines (ELM) in a hierarchical structure, where a forwarding list of ELM layers is concatenated and each of them is processed independently for its corresponding role. The framework enables both representational feature learning and fault classification. The multi-layered ELM based representational learning covers functions including data preprocessing, feature extraction and dimension reduction. An ELM based autoencoder is trained to generate a hidden layer output weight matrix, which is then used to transform the input dataset into a new feature representation. Compared with the traditional feature extraction methods which may empirically wipe off some “insignificant’ feature information that in fact conveys certain undiscovered important knowledge, the introduced representational learning method could overcome the loss of information content. The computed output weight matrix projects the high dimensional input vector into a compressed and orthogonally weighted distribution. The last single layer of ELM is applied for fault classification. Unlike the greedy layer wise learning method adopted in back propagation based deep learning (DL), the proposed framework does not need iterative fine-tuning of parameters. To evaluate its experimental performance, comparison tests are carried out on a wind turbine generator simulator. The results show that the proposed diagnostic framework achieves the best performance among the compared approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency in multiple faults detection of wind turbines.

Keywords: fault diagnosis; wind turbine; classification; extreme learning machines (ELM); autoencoder (AE) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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