CEEMDAN-Based Multiscale CNN for Wind Turbine Gearbox Fault Detection

Abstract

Wind turbines play a critical role in the shift toward sustainable energy generation. Their operation relies on multiple interconnected components, and a failure in any of these can compromise the entire system's functionality. Detecting faults accurately is challenging due to the intricate, non-linear, and non-stationary nature of vibration signals, influenced by dynamic loading, environmental variations, and mechanical interactions. As such, effective signal processing techniques are essential for extracting meaningful features to enhance diagnostic accuracy. This study presents a hybrid approach for fault detection in wind turbine gearboxes, combining Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) and a Multiscale Convolutional Neural Network (MSCNN). CEEMDAN is employed to decompose vibration signals into intrinsic mode functions, isolating critical features at different time-frequency scales. These are then input into the MSCNN, which performs deep hierarchical feature extraction and classification. The proposed method achieves an F1 Score of 98.95\%, evaluated on real-world datasets, and demonstrates superior performance in both detection accuracy and computational speed compared to existing approaches. This framework offers a balanced solution for reliable and efficient fault diagnosis in wind turbine systems.