Wind has become an indispensable energy source in our daily lives. It provides a clean, sustainable and safe energy source to secure our future. A huge investment has been made on this free and stable energy source. While more and more gigantic wind turbines have being built at onshore and offshore windfarms worldwide, keeping the health of a wind turbine has also become a crucial topic for the protection of these important facilities.
The “Early detection” approach for wind turbine maintenance can effectively control a problem before it becomes more complicated or irreversible. Although 24/7 on-site expert monitoring is the best solution - practically, it is not very feasible. Most systems use SCADA to provide a limited off-line analysis of the wind turbine. However, to do 24/7 full-scale analysis for every turbine is still a highly demanding task because it involves a high bandwidth of data transfer, large amounts of storage and a huge amount of human expertise to do the analysis.
Edge Artificial Intelligent inspection, by deploying a smart AI device in a wind turbine, is a new option open to the industry. Instead of sending data off-site for analysis, the edge AI approach enables a first line on-site behavioural analysis of a wind turbine. By applying different AI models on multi-dimensions of wind turbine data, such as windspeed, vibration, temperature, power output … etc, the system can “learn” the data pattern of a wind turbine in good condition and report to the control centre any abnormal data patterns found during the analysis. This technique can potentially be used to discover blade damage, gearbox failure and generator problems in the future.
Like auto-driving or cancer cell detection, AI may not completely replace human effort. We still need our expert to verify and do further analysis for each problem. However, with 24/7 on-site AI technology for first-line wind turbine monitoring, hopefully, our valuable green investments can be more reliable and run a longer life in the future.
Contact Sensonics today to learn more.
