Intelligent fault diagnosis of Wind Turbines via a Deep Learning Network Using Parallel Convolution Layers with Multi-Scale Kernels

In recent years, the intelligent diagnosis technology of wind turbines has made great progress. However, in practical engineering applications, the operating states of wind turbine are various, accompanied by a large number of noise interference, which leads to the decline of the discrimination accuracy of intelligent diagnosis. In order to solve this problem, inspired by the Google team Inception model, this paper proposes a concurrent convolution neural network (C–CNN), the raw data is fed into the network without any prior knowledge, and the characteristics are learned directly and adaptively from the input. Even if the data is accompanied by noise, the model still has high accuracy and strong generalization ability. The model is composed of a CNN with multiple branches. Meanwhile, the convolutional layer of different branches selects the kernels with different scales in same level, thus improving the learning ability of entire network. In this paper, the feasibility of this method for fault diagnosis of bearings in wind turbines is demonstrated by three bearing datasets. The results show that the proposed method can extract discriminative features and classify bearing data accurately under the disturbance of different rotating speed, different load and random noise.