A state detection method of offshore wind turbines’ gearbox bearing based on the transformer and GRU

Abstract Through the analysis of data from the SCADA system of a wind turbine unit in a specific offshore wind farm located in Zhanjiang, it was observed that the most prevalent type of fault is bearing alarms on the gearbox’s generator side. Considering the growing need for intelligent offshore wind turbine maintenance, this study employed GRA on SCADA data collected over a significant duration from a representative wind turbine unit. Relevant features were extracted, with temperature serving as the target parameter. To address the challenge of long-term dependencies in long-term time series forecasting tasks, this study uniquely combined the GRU with the advanced Transformer neural network which incorporates attention mechanisms, to predict the temperature trend of the gearbox’s generator-side bearing. Based on the prediction residuals obtained during normal operation and their subsequent analysis, the study devised an effective anomaly detection process to identify early abnormal states of the gearbox’s generator-side bearing. Comparative performance evaluations were conducted, comparing the combined model with its individual component models, as well as the traditional LightGBM, in terms of temperature time series prediction and their application in anomaly detection. The results unequivocally demonstrate that the combined model outperforms both the individual models and LightGBM in terms of time series prediction accuracy and anomaly detection effectiveness, indicating an enhanced ability to handle long-term memory challenges. Furthermore, the combined model exhibits great potential of practical application for the early warning of gearbox bearing anomalies during actual wind turbine daily operation and maintenance, providing a valuable solution for the offshore wind turbine industry.