Unsupervised Automated Identification Method for Abnormal States of Wind Turbine Gearboxes
Addressing the scarcity of labeled data for training classification models in wind turbine planetary gearbox anomaly identification, this study proposes an unsupervised automated detection method. Log Mel-band energy features are extracted from raw vibration signals and fed into an unsupervised anomaly recognition model centered on a U-net autoencoder. A health-state threshold is established based on reconstruction error between model input and output, enabling anomaly identification. The method is validated using factory gearbox test data and operational data from a wind farm in Yangtouya, Shanxi. For factory gearboxes, dual validation is performed using a spectrum amplitude modulation-based signal processing method. Results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 93.34% recognition accuracy on both factory and wind farm test sets, confirming its capability to automatically and correctly separate abnormal wind turbine gearboxes. The approach eliminates reliance on labeled fault data, offering a scalable solution for full-lifecycle health monitoring, from factory acceptance testing to in-service early anomaly detection, adaptable across different operating conditions and turbine models.