STUDY ON APPLYING THE PEER-TO-PEER COMPARISON METHOD TO DETECT THE LOW PERFORMANCE AND ABNORMAL OPERATION WIND TURBINE IN A WIND FARM

The Peer-to-Peer comparison method was used to construct an evaluation procedure to detect the low performance and abnormal operation wind turbine in a wind farm. The Self-Organizing Map algorithm was used to cluster the different wind turbine group based on the similarity of the wind speed and wind direction. There are two types of clustering, one is that there is more than one turbine in a group, and the other is that there is only one tur-bine which is called independent wind turbine. For a group of turbines, an exemplary wind turbine was selected. The exemplary wind turbine is defined as the root mean square error between the turbine output power and the guaranteed power curve provided by the turbine maker is minimum. Then, the Gaussian mixture model was used to model the power, rotor RPM, blade pitch angle with wind speed and the yaw angle between wind direction and nacelle angle. The confidence values of wind speed-power between the exemplary wind turbine and other wind turbines in the same group were calculated. The turbine was picked out when its power confidence value was smaller than 0.7. The other parameters were applied to make comparisons between the exemplary wind turbine and the low performance wind turbine to find out the possible causes of the low performance. The established procedure was applied to analyze the SCADA data from a wind farm of Taipower company. There were three groups after clustering the turbines of the wind farm. The first group have thirteen wind turbines which the wind direction is about 10 degrees east of north, the second group have three wind turbines which the wind direction is about north. The third group have 6 wind turbines which the wind direction has abnormal wind direction. In group 1, there are four wind turbines, 7, 9, 10, and 12 which had low performance when compared with exemplary wind turbine 5. In group 2, there is only one low performance wind turbine 13 when compared with exemplary wind turbine 6. All low performance wind turbines were started up at high wind speed which the wind speed is greater than 8m/s, except wind turbine 7. The low performance may due to the abnormal cut-in control logic at high speed wind or the low performance output of the generator. The independent group have six wind turbines which are 3, 8, 11, 9, 21 and 22 wind turbines. The wind direction of wind turbine 19 is about 35 degrees east of north. The wind direction of wind turbine 8 was at south. The other wind turbines also have wind direction from south in the northeast wind season. That means the wind sensors should be checked for the independent group of wind turbines.