Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Renewable Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene

Compound faults diagnosis and analysis for a wind turbine gearbox

via a novel vibration model and empirical wavelet transform
Wei Teng a, Xian Ding b, Hao Cheng a, Chen Han a, Yibing Liu a, *, Haihua Mu c, **
a
Key Laboratory of Condition Monitoring and Control for Power Plant Equipment of Ministry of Education, North China Electric Power University, Beijing
102206, China
b
Luneng New Energy (Group) Co., Ltd., Beijing 100020, China
c
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Fault diagnosis of a wind turbine gearbox can schedule maintenance strategy on a wind turbine and save
Received 26 February 2018 operational cost for wind farms. Owing to low rotational speed and weak vibration energy, fault diag-
Received in revised form nosis for planetary stage is arduous in a wind turbine gearbox involving multi-stage transmissions. A
29 July 2018
novel modulation model is presented to support the fault diagnosis of the planetary stage of a wind
Accepted 26 December 2018
Available online 4 January 2019
turbine gearbox, which is described as the mesh frequency of intermediate stage, high speed stage, or
mechanical natural frequency of the gearbox is a carrier wave modulated by the mesh frequency of
planetary stage with distributed faults. Even possessing this presented vibration model, the fault feature
Keywords:
Wind turbine gearbox
of planetary stage with lower rotational speed is easily concealed by the meshing vibration energy of
Compound faults ordinary stages with higher speed, especially when faults simultaneously arise in the ordinary stages.
Modulation model Aiming at the diagnosis of the above compound faults in an industrial wind turbine gearbox, empirical
Empirical wavelet transform wavelet transform is utilized to adaptively find weak fault frequency in planetary stage as well as evident
fault characteristics in other ordinary stages.
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Ref. [8], among the referred monitoring approaches, vibration

An increasing number of wind turbines have been put into
operation worldwide because of the low generating cost and zero-
emission of wind energy. Bearing stochastic wind speed and load,
wind turbines operate under complex environment, leading the
gearbox to be one of the most frequent failed subassemblies in
wind turbines.
Condition monitoring [1,2] is necessary for wind turbines to
detect incipient fault and prevent them from catastrophic results
induced by failed subassemblies. Vibration analysis is a powerful
tool enabling the early detection of impending failure of bearings
and gears [3]. Other monitoring techniques have been developed as
well, e. g., electrical analysis for wind turbine synchronous gener-
ator [4], acoustic emission method to locate planet gear fault [5], oil
debris monitoring for a wind turbine gearbox [6], thermophysics
analysis for wind turbine drive trains [7] etc. As pointed out in
* Corresponding author.
** Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: lyb@ncepu.edu.cn (Y. Liu), muhh@tsinghua.edu.cn (H. Mu).
analysis is prevalent in fault detection of wind turbine gearboxes,
because it has a high sensitivity to incipient defects and superior
ability in fault location. As ISO 13373-1 [9], acceleration is recom-
mended as the vibration measurement quantity for condition
monitoring of rolling bearings and gears instead of displacement
and velocity, because most of the faults of gears and bearings are
exhibited at high frequency range.
Vibration model is a theoretical description for the generating
and transferring process of vibration energy in a gearbox, which
enables providing fault characteristic frequency for further fault
diagnosis. Due to the revolution of the planet carrier, the vibration
mechanism of planetary gear is complicated and attracts increasing
attentions. Feng and Zuo [10] deduced a vibration model for the
fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes on the basis of amplitude and
frequency modulation effects and calculated the characteristic
frequencies of faulty planet gear, sun gear and ring gear. Inalpolat
and Kahraman [11] presented a mathematical model to express the
vibration mechanism resulting in modulation sidebands of plane-
tary gear. Parra and Vicun ~ a [12] proposed phenomenological and
lumped-parameter models to study the frequency contents of
planetary gearbox vibrations under non-fault and different fault

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.12.094
0960-1481/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
394 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402
conditions. Lei et al. [13] considered the time-varying vibration
transfer paths to construct phenomenological model for epicyclic
gearboxes. With the computed fault characteristic frequency from
theoretical models, many approaches, like adaptive stochastic
resonance [14], autocorrelation-based time synchronous averaging
[15], discrete spectrum correction technique [16] and iterative
generalized synchrosqueezing transform [17] etc., have been pro-
posed to diagnose the defects in pure planetary gearboxes.
The above models focused on the vibration analysis for pure
planetary gear sets where the mesh frequency of the planetary
stage is treated as a carrier wave that is probably modulated by the
fault characteristic frequency of sun gear, planet gear and ring gear.
Actually, an industrial wind turbine gearbox contains both plane-
tary stage and ordinary stages, making the fault characteristics in
planetary stage hard to emerge due to its lower rotational speed
than the ordinary stages, particularly when faults simultaneously
arise in the ordinary stages, causing more intensive vibration en-
ergy. Except the detection of tooth crack of ring gear [18], successful
diagnosis cases for detecting faults of planetary stage in a real wind
turbine gearbox are few, which demonstrates the vibration models
of pure planetary gearboxes are unfeasible for industrial wind
turbine gearboxes.
In a wind turbine gearbox, except for the simplex fault in
planetary stage, compound faults happen frequently because once
one part (gear or bearing) fails, it could cause asymmetric forces
and unexpected vibrations or shocks, thus leading to the failure of
the other parts. For the diagnosis of compound faults emerged in
planetary stage and ordinary stages, there exist three ticklish tasks:
1) The fault features in planetary stage are generally weak, and is
readily hidden by the intensive vibration energy caused by faults in
ordinary stages; 2) The frequency bands implicating faults are hard
to be located due to the multi-stage transmission in a wind turbine
gearbox, for this, conventional demodulation analysis is low accu-
racy and inefficiency; 3) It is difficult for analyzing the failure
sequence of different parts, obstructing the judgment of primary
failure incentive. Empirical wavelet transform presented by Gilles
[19] in 2013, enable decomposing the vibration signal into a series
of empirical modes on the basis of its energy distribution in fre-
quency domain. Each decomposed empirical mode could auto-
matically match the multiple fault features in different frequency
bands in wind turbine gearboxes. Empirical wavelet transform not
only has explicit physical meaning but good adaptivity like the
classic empirical mode decomposition [20], thereby providing a
way to deal with the above challenges in the detection of com-
pound faults. As a novel signal processing method with excellent
decomposition performances, empirical wavelet transform has
been applied in the time-frequency analysis of noisy nonlinear and
non-stationary signals [21], the short-term wind speed prediction
[22], and the fault diagnosis of a wind turbine generator [23].
In this paper, a novel vibration model is proposed to support the
fault diagnosis of planetary stage in a wind turbine gearbox, which
is described as the mesh frequency of intermediate stage, the mesh
frequency of high speed stage, or certain casing natural frequency is
a carrier wave modulated by the mesh frequency of the planetary
stage with distributed faults. Meanwhile, to manifest the fault
frequencies in both planetary stage and ordinary stages without
human interferences, empirical wavelet transform is applied to
adaptively locate fault frequency bands and demodulate potential
fault features caused by defective gears. In Section 2, the drive train
including a gearbox of a wind turbine is illustrated and the novel
modulation model is described in detail. The principle of empirical
wavelet transform is referred in Section 3. In the study case of
Section 4, multiple faults of a real wind turbine gearbox are
detected using empirical wavelet transform, which verify the pro-
posed modulation model. The failure mechanism of the multiple
gears is analyzed. Section 5 concludes this paper.
2. Wind turbine gearbox
2.1. Structure of the wind turbine gearbox
The drive train of the wind turbine is shown in Fig. 1, which
involves the blades, rotor hub, main bearing, gearbox, and gener-
ator. The blades assimilate stochastic winds, and promote the rotor
hub to rotate at a low rotational speed. Then the low speed is
accelerated by the gearbox, further drive the rotor of the generator
to generate electric power. Suffering from harsh operational con-
ditions, the critical parts (gears or bearings) transferring variational
loads are vulnerable, thus seven piezoelectric accelerometers are
installed on the surface of the drive train to monitor the health
states of the critical parts.
As shown in Fig. 2, a wind turbine gearbox falls into three parts:
planetary stage (PS), intermediate stage (IS) and high speed stage
(HSS). Among which, 1 is the planet carrier, 2 is the sun shaft, 3 is
the intermediate shaft, and 4 is the high speed shaft. The PS consists
of planetary gear Zp, sun gear Zs and ring gear Zc, the IS is formed by
the big gear Zmi on the sun shaft and the pinion Zmo on the inter-
mediate shaft, and the HSS is composed by the big gear Zhi on the
intermediate shaft and the pinion Zho on the high speed shaft.
For the drive train in Fig. 2, the rotational frequency fr of the
planet carrier in the gearbox equals to the one of the rotor hub. The
sun gear and the big gear in IS are both installed on the sun shaft
with the same rotational frequency fs. The pinion in IS and the big
gear in HSS are both on the intermediate shaft with the same
rotational frequency fi. The pinion in HSS is on the high speed shaft
with a rotational frequency fh.
2.2. A novel modulation model of the wind turbine gearbox
In the wind turbine gearbox, the mesh frequency of PS is
expressed as
fPS ¼ fr  Zc ¼ ðfs  fr Þ  Zs (1)
The IS and HSS are ordinary stages in the wind turbine gearbox,
whose mesh frequencies are computed as
fIS ¼ fs  Zmi ¼ fi  Zmo (2)
fHSS ¼ fi  Zhi ¼ fh  Zho (3)
For conventional fault diagnosis of a gearbox, a common theory
is that the rotational frequency of shaft with a faulty gear will
modulate the mesh frequency of the gear pair or other mechanical
natural frequencies. No exception in a pure planetary gearbox, any
local defects on sun gear, planet gear and ring gear will modulate
the mesh frequency of planetary stage. Feng [10] proposed three
characteristic frequencies representing potential faults on sun gear,
Fig. 1. Drive train of the wind turbine.
 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402
Fig. 2. Structure of the wind turbine gearbox: 1 - planet carrier; 2 - sun shaft; 3 - intermediate shaft; 4 - high speed shaft.
planet gear and ring gear, which are all derived by considering the
rotational frequency of related shafts and transfer paths.
However, in a real wind turbine gearbox consisting of three
stages in Fig. 2, the fault characteristics of the sun gear, ring gear or
planet gears of the PS are difficult to be evidenced because the
rotational speed of the PS is much lower than the ones of IS and
HSS. In fact, local faults (crack on a tooth, or missing a tooth) seldom
emerge in planetary stage due to its symmetric structure and
strong load ability. By contrast, the distributed faults in planetary
stage are usually inevitable after a long-term abrasive wear by
meshing sun gear with planet gear, and planet gear with ring gear.
Once distributed faults emerge in the planetary stage, the backlash
between the meshed gears will increase, causing more intensive
mesh shock than that in healthy state. The frequency of the
enhanced mesh shock equals to the mesh frequency of the plane-
tary stage. Due to staying in the same gearbox, the vibration energy
from different mesh stages (PS, IS and HSS) can transfer with each
other. Therefore, as shown at the top in Fig. 2, the enhanced mesh
shock of PS will modulate the mesh process of IS and HSS, even
excite the natural frequency of the casing of the wind turbine
gearbox. The modulation process caused by the mesh frequency of
PS is expressed as
yðtÞ ¼ ½1 þ A cosð2pfPS tÞcos½2pfc t þ B cosð2pfPS t þ 4Þ þ q
where fc is the carrier wave frequency, A and B are the amplitudes of
the amplitude-modulation and frequency-modulation waves, 4 is
the initial phase of the frequency-modulation wave, and q is the
initial phase of the vibration signal. Comparing with the vibration
models of pure planetary gear sets in Refs. [10e13], the modulation
frequency in Eq. (4) is not the concrete characteristic frequency of
the ring gear, sun gear or planet gears, but the mesh frequency of
the planetary stage with distributed faults. While the carrier wave
frequency fc may be the mesh frequency of IS and HSS, or certain
natural frequency of the casing instead of the mesh frequency of the
395
planetary stage in conventional models [10e13]. The carrier wave
in Eq. (4) could be individual mesh vibration of IS, HSS, certain
natural frequency of the casing, or their combination as well.
Anyway, if the mesh frequency of the planetary stage is demodu-
lated from the vibration signal, distributed faults could be deduced
to arise in the planetary stage of the wind turbine gearbox.
In vibration test, the accelerometer is mounted on the surface of
the gearbox, equaling to on the outside of the stationary ring gear in
the planetary stage (as the accelerometer 3 shown in Fig. 1). When
one planet gear moves under the accelerometer, the vibration is
maximum. After half circular revolution of the planet carrier, this
planet gear moves at the farthest position from the accelerometer,
the vibration is minimum. With the three planet gears driven by
the planet carrier passing through the accelerometer one by one,
three times of maximum and minimum arise during one revolution
of the planet carrier. Thus the vibration signal caused by this pass
effect [24] of the three planet gears is
hðtÞ ¼ ½1  cosð2p  3fr tÞ (5)
The total vibration signal of the wind turbine gearbox with
distributed faults in PS is shown as
xðtÞ ¼ yðtÞ  hðtÞ (6)
(4)
3. Empirical wavelet transform
Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is an effective tool to
adaptively decompose a signal into different intrinsic mode func-
tions (IMFs) through seeking the local maxima of the signal [20].
Due to its adaptability, EMD has been applied in the fault diagnosis
of various rotating machinery [25e27]. However, the lack of theory
is the most fatal drawback of EMD, making many decomposed IMFs
difficult to be explained. In view of this, Gilles [19] proposed an
396 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402

empirical wavelet transform (EWT) considering both adaptability
and interpretability.
Similar to the traditional wavelet transform, in empirical
wavelet transform a scaling function f b 1 ðuÞ and several wavelet
b ðuÞ (n ¼ 1: N) are constructed in frequency domain to
functions j
n
form a series of filters [19].
of the critical parts, e.g., gears or bearings. Because of the lower
rotational speed of the hub rotor than the other shafts in the
gearbox, the sampling frequency for the first three accelerometers
is 5120 Hz. Due to the higher rotational speed of the high speed
shaft, the sampling frequency for the last four accelerometers is
25600 Hz. The rotational speed of the hub rotor was 14 rpm during

8
>
> 1; if juj  u1  t1
>
>  

< p 1
b 1 ðuÞ ¼ cos b
f ðjuj  u1 þ t1 Þ ; if u1  t1  juj  u1 þ t1 (7)
>
> 2 2t1
>
>
:
0; otherwise

8
>
> 1; if un þ tn  juj  unþ1  tnþ1
>
>  

>
> p 1
>
> cos b ðjuj  unþ1 þ tnþ1 Þ ; if unþ1  tnþ1  juj  unþ1 þ tnþ1
>
< 2 2tnþ1
b ðuÞ ¼
j  
(8)
n
>
> p 1
>
> sin b ðjuj  un þ tn Þ ; if un  tn  juj  un þ tn
>
> 2tn
>
> 2
>
:
0; otherwise

where un is the center frequency of the drop edge of the nth filter this vibration test, and the rotational frequency of the other shafts
and the ascendant edge of the (nþ1)th filter, tn is a half frequency and the mesh frequency of different stages are listed in Table 2
width of the above edges, and the superscript ‘^’ denotes that fb 1 ðuÞ according to Eq. (1) through (3).
and jb ðuÞ are from their time form f ðtÞ and j ðtÞ by Fourier
n 1 n
transform. The designed filter bank include Nþ1 filters. 4.2. Vibration analysis for the faulty wind turbine gearbox
b(m) is an arbitrary function defined in range [0 1], which is used
to construct Meyer's wavelet. Referring to Ref. [28], b(m) is The aim of this paper is to monitor the health state of the wind
8 turbine gearbox and find the potential faults in it. Fig. 3 shows the
>
<  0 if m  0  vibration signals from the four accelerometers mounted on the
bðmÞ ¼ m4 35  84m þ 70m2  20m3 ; if m2½0; 1 (9) surface of the gearbox. The vibration amplitudes of accelerometers
>
:
1; if m  1 2, 3 and 4 are in a range ±10 m/s2, and the accelerometer 5 ap-
proaches ±20 m/s2 owing to the higher speed of the rotational
The aim of EWT is to decompose the vibration signal x(t) into shafts there. Regardless of the obvious and regular shocks in Fig. 3b,
several empirical modes (EMs) using the filter bank Eq. (7) and Eq. the stochastic vibration components almost occupy the vibration
(8). The filters number Nþ1 depends on the number of local max- signals of accelerometers 2, 4 and 5, and it is difficult to detect the
ima in frequency domain of the signal, thus EWT is adaptive. hidden faults only through observing these temporal signals.
As we know, the convolution between the vibration signal and Accelerometer 3 is installed on the top of the planetary stage,
the temporal expression of a filter is equivalent to the product of thus it can directly reflect the health state of the sun gear, planet
the referred two terms in frequency domain. On the basis of this, gear and ring gear. Fig. 4a is the vibration signal of accelerometer 3
the EMs in empirical wavelet transform are obtained as within 22.4 s, where the evident impulses represent some potential
   gear fault. The signal is stretched as in Fig. 4b within 1 s. Here the
b 1 ðuÞ
EM1 ¼ F 1 F nxðtÞg  f  (10)
interval of the impulses is 0.168 s corresponding to the rotational
EMn ¼ F 1 F xðtÞg  j b ðuÞ frequency fi in Table 2, which means one of the two gears on the
n
intermediate shaft fails. Except for this, no other fault information
where F denotes the Fourier transform of the original signal, F ¡1 can be found in Fig. 4.
denotes the inverse Fourier transform, and x(t) is the original vi- The vibration signal in Fig. 4a is transformed into power
bration signal.
Table 1
The numbers of teeth of multiple gears in the wind turbine gearbox.
4. Case study
Zp Zs Zc Zmi Zmo Zhi Zho
4.1. Faulty wind turbine gearbox 35 17 87 101 24 82 21

The rated power of the tested wind turbine is 2.0 MW. Its drive
train and the structure of the gearbox are shown in Figs. 1 and 2 Table 2
with one planetary stage and two ordinary stages. The trans- Shaft rotational frequencies and gear meshing frequencies.
mission ratio of the gearbox is 100.5, with the numbers of teeth of fr fs fi fh fPS fIS fHSS
the multiple gears listed in Table 1. Seven accelerometers are
0.234 1.43 6.04 23.6 20.4 144.9 495.3
installed on the surface of the drive train to monitor the health state
 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402 397

20 a

A [m/s ]
2
0

-20
0 5 10 15 20
t [s]
20 b
A [m/s ]
2

-20
0 5 10 15 20
t [s]
20 c
A [m/s ]
2

-20
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5
t [s]

20
d
A [m/s ]
2

0
-20
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5
t [s]
Fig. 3. Vibration signals: a) accelerometer 2; b) accelerometer 3; c) accelerometer 4; d) accelerometer 5.

20 a
10
A [m/s ]
2

-10

-20
0 5 10 15 20
t [s]

20 b
10
A [m/s ]
2

-10 0.168 0.168 0.168 0.168

-20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
t [s]
Fig. 4. Vibration signals of accelerometer 3: a) within 22.4s; b) within 1s.

spectrum density shown in Fig. 5a where three concentrated en- off frequencies of the bandpass filters are [500 Hz, 700 Hz], [950 Hz,
ergy bands are evidenced. Then three 4th-order Butterworth 1250 Hz], and [1250 Hz, 1600 Hz] respectively. Fig. 5b through
bandpass filters are designed to filter the vibration signal. The cut- Fig. 5d are the envelope spectra of the filtered signals from the
398 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402

band 1 band 2 band 3 20 a 1 b

Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

0.1 a 5.94
0 0.5 11.7
0.05 -20 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
0
500 1000 1500 2000 2500 5 c 0.78
f [Hz] 0.05
1.4 d
0
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

0.1 1.4
0.78 b -5 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15
0.05

Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

5 e 0.02 5.94
f

A [m/s ]
11.7

2
0 0 0.01 17.5 23.4
0 5 10 15
f [Hz] -5 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

5.94 2 g 0.01 5.94

c h
0.5 11.7 0 0.005
17.5
-2 0
0 0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1 i 0.02
f [Hz] 5.94 j
0 0.01
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

d -1 0
0.2 20.8
5.94 11.7 0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
0.1 17.5 23.4 29.2 t [s] f [Hz]
0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Fig. 7. Analysis results using EMD: a) IMF1; b) envelope spectrum of IMF1; c) IMF2; d)
f [Hz] envelope spectrum of IMF2; e) IMF3; f) envelope spectrum of IMF3; g) IMF4; h) enve-
lope spectrum of IMF4; i) IMF5; j) envelope spectrum of IMF5.
Fig. 5. Power spectrum density: a) power spectrum density of the vibration signal; b)
envelope spectrum from band 1; c) envelope spectrum from band 2; d) envelope
spectrum from band 3. The envelope analysis enable the diagnosis for all the potential
faults in the wind turbine gearbox, but the bandpass filters still
need to be designed by experienced individuals, resulting in lacking
three frequency bands. In Fig. 5b, there is a hump at 0.78 Hz rep-
the intelligence of fault diagnostic. For the condition monitoring of
resenting the pass effect of three planet gears (the rotational fre-
wind turbines, a great number of vibration signals need to be duly
quency of the planet carrier is 0.234 Hz, 0.234*3 z 0.78 Hz).
processed due to the high sampling frequency and massive turbines
Another frequency component 1.4 Hz is distinct, which matches the
in a wind farm. Therefore, an intelligent and adaptive approach to
rotational frequency fs of the sun shaft in Table 2. This phenomenon
diagnose faults in wind turbine gearboxes is urgent.
illustrates that one of the two gears on the sun shaft may be faulty.
Although the wind speed is time-variant, the huge inertia
In Fig. 5c, the prominent rotational frequency 5.94 Hz (fi in Table 2)
generated by the heavy blades and rotor makes the rotational speed
and its harmonics are in agreement with the temporal intervals in
of the drive train of a wind turbine vary slowly in a relative short
Fig. 4b. Combining the arisen frequencies fs and fi in the envelope
spectra, we deduce that the two gears in IS are failure. In Fig. 5d, in
addition to the rotational frequency 5.94 Hz and its harmonics, the
mesh frequency 20.8 Hz of the PS emerges, matching the modula-
tion process in Eq. (4), which reveals the possible distributed de-
fects in PS.

a 0.1
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

5
b
0.78
A [m/s ]
2

0 0.05 1.4
-5 2.8
0
0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15
20 c 1 d
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]
A [m/s ]

5.94
2

0 0.5
11.7
17.5
-20 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
10 e 0.1
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

20.7 f
A [m/s ]
2

5.94 11.7
0 0.05
17.5 23.4 29.2

-10 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
t [s] f [Hz]

Fig. 6. Analysis results using EWT: a) EM1; b) envelope spectrum of EM1; c) EM2; d)
envelope spectrum of EM2; e) EM3; f) envelope spectrum of EM3. Fig. 8. The broken pinion on the intermediate shaft.
 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402
Fig. 9. The broken big gear on the sun shaft.
b c
Fig. 10. The photography of the sun gear: a) the worn sun gear; b) one worn tooth of the sun gear; c) another worn tooth of the sun gear.
399
time. This property accords with the application characteristic of
empirical wavelet transform [19]. Here, the vibration signal of
accelerometer 3 is decomposed into three EMs using empirical
wavelet transform, shown in Fig. 6. The number of EMs is selected
as three because there are three energy bands in the power spec-
trum density of Fig. 5a.
In Fig. 6, the left column shows the decomposed EMs, and the
right one shows the corresponding envelope spectra. In Fig. 6b, the
0.78 Hz, three times of the rotational frequency of the planet carrier
denotes the pass effect of three planet gears in Eq. (5). In Fig. 6b,
d and f, the 1.4 Hz, 5.94 Hz and their harmonics are the rotational
frequencies of the sun shaft and intermediate shaft, associating to
the failure of the gear pair in IS. In Fig. 6f, the 20.7 Hz, the modu-
lation frequency in Eq. (6), is also demodulated, corresponding to
the distributed faults in PS. Except for the modulation components
3fr and fPS in Eq. (6), and the rotational frequency of the shafts in IS,
any other characteristic frequencies concerning sun gear, ring gear
and planet gears are not found in Fig. 6, demonstrating that the
novel model in Eq. (6) performs superior in detecting the distrib-
uted faults of PS in a wind turbine gearbox than the vibration
models of the pure planetary gear sets [10,11]. The diagnosis result
about defective gears on the sun shaft, intermediate shaft and PS is
further verified by EWT. Comparing with the conventional
demodulation analysis in Fig. 5, although the same diagnosis result
is drawn, EWT is more intelligent because it is unnecessary to
artificially design bandpass filters.
As a contrast, EMD is adopted to decompose the original vi-
bration signal and the analysis results are shown in Fig. 7. 1.4 Hz
representing the rotational frequency of the sun shaft emerges in
Fig. 7d and 5.94 Hz and its harmonics representing the rotational
frequency of the intermediate shaft are distinct in Fig. 7b, f, h and j.
Unfortunately, the mesh frequency of PS, a modulation component
in Fig. 6f, is absent in Fig. 7, which demonstrates that EMD is less
400 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402
Fig. 11. The scratched planet gear.
favorable than EWT in detecting the compound faults of the wind
turbine gearbox.
The disassembled wind turbine gearbox is shown from
Figs. 8e12. Fig. 8 is the broken pinion on the intermediate shaft, and
Fig. 9 is the broken big gear on the sun shaft. They correspond to the
rotational frequency 5.94 Hz and 1.4 Hz respectively. Fig. 10a is the
photography of the sun gear where some wear signs happen.
Fig. 10b and c are the nicks on the sun gear. Fig. 11 shows the
scratched planet gear. Fig. 12a exhibits the part of the ring gear, and
there is local pitting in Fig. 12b. Although the defects on the sun
Fig. 12. The pitting on the surface of the ring gear: a) a part of the ring gear; b) a pitting
on the tooth.
gear, planet gear and ring gear are less severe than the broken gears
in IS, the mesh frequency 20.7 Hz of the PS is still distinctly
demodulated by EWT in Fig. 6f, which proves that the emergence of
the mesh frequency of the PS as a modulation information denotes
the faults in PS.
4.3. Analysis of the failure mechanism
In order to explore the failure reason of the tested wind turbine
gearbox, the vibration signals two years and four years ago are
collected and shown in Fig. 13. In Fig. 13a the vibration signal two
years earlier, the vibration amplitude approached the range in
Fig. 4a, while the degree of shocks was less intensive than the
current test. Due to the property of the varying rotational speed, the
rotational frequency of the hub rotor was 0.286 Hz at that time. The
analysis result of Fig. 13a using EWT is shown in Fig. 14, from which,
the three times of rotational frequency of hub rotor (0.86 Hz)
denoting the pass effect of the planet gears is evident, and the
rotational frequencies of the sun shaft (1.64 Hz and its harmonics)
are dominant. The above phenomenon indicates that the gear fault
or imbalance of the sun shaft has already emerged from then on.
But the absence of the mesh frequency of the PS in Fig. 14 signifies
that there was no fault in PS two years earlier. While observing the
vibration signal four years earlier in Fig. 13b, the vibration ampli-
tude is much lower than the one in Fig. 13a. In the analysis results of
Fig. 15 using EWT, the vibration energies of the demodulated fre-
quencies are faint, meaning the gearbox was in a good health
condition four years earlier.
The analysis results from EWT at different times show that the
failure process was deteriorating progressively. Four years ago, the
status of this wind turbine gearbox was superior. Two years ago, an
abnormal modulation frequency (the rotational frequency of the
sun shaft) arose, which exhibited incipient fault feature. After
another two years, the gearbox breaks down, resulting in the
destroyed gears as Figs. 8 and 9. The imbalance or eccentricity of
the sun shaft two years earlier is deduced as the primary incentive
for the successive catastrophic damage. It makes the mesh forces of
the gear pair in IS asymmetric, further damaging the gear pair. At
the same time, the imbalance of the sun shaft affects the planetary
stage, leading to the distributed scratches in PS. The debris from the
broken gears in IS fall into the clearance of the PS, and form the
indentation in Fig. 12b.
20 a
10
A [m/s ]
2
-10
-20
0 5 10 15 20
t [s]
1 b
0.5
A [m/s ]
2
-0.5
-1
0 5 10 15 20
t [s]
Fig. 13. Vibration signals of accelerometer 3: a) two years earlier; b) four years earlier.
 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402 401

-3
x 10
2 a 6 0.86 b

Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

1.64

A [m/s ]
0 4

2
-2 2

-4 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15
10 c 3 d

Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

1.64
A [m/s ]

2
2

0 3.36
1

-10 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
20 e 3

Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

1.64 f
A [m/s ]

2
2

0 3.36
1

-20 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
t [s] f [Hz]
Fig. 14. Analysis results two years earlier using EWT: a) EM1; b) envelope spectrum of EM1; c) EM2; d) envelope spectrum of EM2; e) EM3; f) envelope spectrum of EM3.

-5
x 10 parts.
a
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

0.5 5 0.625 b A novel modulation model of a wind turbine gearbox is pre-

1.25
A [m/s ]
2

sented in this paper, which is described as the mesh frequency of

0
intermediate stage, the mesh frequency of high speed stage, or
certain casing natural frequency is a carrier wave modulated by the
-0.5 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 mesh frequency of the planetary stage with distributed faults. The
x 10
-3 emergence of the mesh frequency of the PS as a modulation in-
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

1 c 1 d formation represents the distributed faults on the gears of plane-

0.625
A [m/s ]

tary stage. For the diagnosis of the compound faults in an industry

2

0 0.5 wind turbine gearbox, empirical wavelet transform enables

decomposing the vibration signal adaptively and detecting multiple
-1 0
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30 modulation components accurately, performing superior than
-4 classic empirical mode decomposition. The failure mechanism of
x 10
e
Psd [(m/s2 ) 2/Hz]

1 5 f the compound faults in the tested wind turbine gearbox can be

A [m/s ]

summarized as the initial imbalance or eccentricity of the sun shaft.

2

0 The proposed vibration model and the usage of EWT provide an

effective tool for the diagnosis of compound faults in wind turbine
-1 0 gearboxes.
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30
t [s] f [Hz]

Fig. 15. Analysis results four years earlier using EWT: a) EM1; b) envelope spectrum of
Acknowledgments
EM1; c) EM2; d) envelope spectrum of EM2; e) EM3; f) envelope spectrum of EM3.
The research presented in this paper was supported by National
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51775186, 51305135), the
According to the damage degrees from Figs. 8e12, the broken Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China
gears in the IS must be changed, and the defect gears in the PS can (No. 2018MS013), Science and Technology Plan Projects of Hebei
be milled and put into operation again. (15214307D), and the National High Technology Research and
Development Program of China (863 Program) (No.
5. Conclusion 2015AA043702).

In wind turbine gearboxes, the multi-stage transmission with References

various gears and bearings makes the vibration signal complicated,
enhancing the difficulty of fault diagnosis. Moreover, the failure of [1] Y. Amirat, M.E.H. Benbouzid, E. Al-Ahmar, B. Bensaker, S. Turri, A brief status
on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis in wind energy conversion sys-
one part causes a variation of stiffness, strength and mesh force of tems, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 13 (9) (2009) 2629e2636.
the gear pair, which is prone to lead to successive faults of other [2] Z. Tian, T. Jin, B. Wu, F. Ding, Condition based maintenance optimization for
402 W. Teng et al. / Renewable Energy 136 (2019) 393e402
wind power generation systems under continuous monitoring, Renew. Energy
36 (5) (2011) 1502e1509.
[3] R.U. Maheswari, R. Umamaheswari, Trends in non-stationary signal process-
ing techniques applied to vibration analysis of wind turbine drive train - a
contemporary survey, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 85 (2017) 296e311.
[4] W. Yang, P.J. Tavner, M.R. Wilkinson, Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis
of a wind turbine synchronous generator drive train, IET Renew. Power Gener.
3 (1) (2009) 1e11.
[5] Y. Zhang, W.X. Lu, F.L. Chu, Planet gear fault localization for wind turbine
gearbox using acoustic emission signals, Renew. Energy 109 (2017) 449e460.
[6] R. Dupuis, Application of oil debris monitoring for wind turbine gearbox
prognostics and health management, in: Proceedings of the Annual Confer-
ence of the Prognostics and Health Management Society, Portland, OR, USA,
October 2010, pp. 10e16.
[7] Y. Qiu, Y. Feng, J. Sun, W. Zhang, D. Infield, Applying thermophysics for wind
turbine drivetrain fault diagnosis using SCADA data, IET Renew. Power Gener.
10 (5) (2016) 661e668.
[8] B. Lu, Y.Y. Li, X. Wu, Z.Z. Yang, A review of recent advances in wind turbine
condition monitoring and fault diagnosis, in: IEEE Conferences on Power
Electronics and Machines in Wind Applications, 2009, pp. 1e7 (Lincoln, NE,
USA).
[9] ISO 13373-1, Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics of Machines e Vibration
Condition Monitoring, Part 1: General Procedures, July, 2002.
[10] Z.P. Feng, M.J. Zuo, Vibration signal models for fault diagnosis of planetary
gearboxes, J. Sound Vib. 331 (22) (2012) 4919e4939.
[11] M. Inalpolat, A. Kahraman, A theoretical and experimental investigation of
modulation sidebands of planetary gear sets, J. Sound Vib. 323 (3e5) (2009)
677e696.
[12] J. Parra, C.M. Vicun ~ a, Two methods for modeling vibrations of planetary
gearboxes including faults: comparison and validation, Mech. Syst. Signal
Process. 92 (2017) 213e225.
[13] Y.G. Lei, Z.Y. Liu, J. Lin, F.B. Lu, Phenomenological models of vibration signals
for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of epicyclic gearboxes, J. Sound
Vib. 369 (2016) 266e281.
[14] Y.G. Lei, D. Han, J. Lin, Z.J. He, Planetary gearbox fault diagnosis using an
adaptive stochastic resonance method, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 38 (1)
(2013) 113e124.
[15] J.M. Ha, B.D. Youn, H. Oh, B. Han, Y. Jung, J. Park, Autocorrelation-based time
synchronous averaging for condition monitoring of planetary gearboxes in
wind turbines, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 70e71 (2016) 161e175.
[16] G.L. He, K. Ding, W.H. Li, X.T. Jiao, A novel order tracking method for wind
turbine planetary gearbox vibration analysis based on discrete spectrum
correction technique, Renew. Energy 87 (2016) 364e375.
[17] Z.P. Feng, X.W. Chen, M. Liang, Iterative generalized synchrosqueezing
transform for fault diagnosis of wind turbine planetary gearbox under
nonstationary conditions, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 52e53 (1) (2015)
360e375.
[18] T. Barszcz, R.B. Randall, Application of spectral kurtosis for detection of a tooth
crack in the planetary gear of a wind turbine, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 23 (4)
(2009) 1352e1365.
[19] J. Gilles, Empirical wavelet transform, IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 61 (16)
(2013) 3999e4010.
[20] N.E. Huang, Z. Shen, S.R. Long, The empirical mode decomposition and the
Hilbert spectrum for nonlinear and non-stationary time series analysis, Proc.
R. Soc. Lond. Ser. 454 (1998) 903e995.
[21] J.P. Amezquita-Sanchez, H. Adeli, A new music-empirical wavelet transform
methodology for time-frequency analysis of noisy nonlinear and non-
stationary signals, Digit. Signal Process. 45 (C) (2015) 55e68.
[22] J. Hu, J. Wang, Short-term wind speed prediction using empirical wavelet
transform and Gaussian process regression, Energy 93 (2015) 1456e1466.
[23] J.L. Chen, J. Pan, Z.P. Li, Y.Y. Zi, X.F. Chen, Generator bearing fault diagnosis for
wind turbine via empirical wavelet transform using measured vibration sig-
nals, Renew. Energy 89 (2016) 80e92.
[24] Z.P. Feng, M.J. Zuo, J. Qu, T. Tian, Z.L. Liu, Joint amplitude and frequency
demodulation analysis based on local mean decomposition for fault diagnosis
of planetary gearboxes, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 40 (2013) 56e75.
[25] S. Braun, M. Feldman, Decomposition of non-stationary signals into varying
time scales: some aspects of the EMD and HVD methods, Mech. Syst. Signal
Process. 25 (7) (2011) 2608e2630.
[26] Y.G. Lei, J. Lin, Z.J. He, M.J. Zuo, A review on empirical mode decomposition in
fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 35 (1e2)
(2013) 108e126.
[27] W. Teng, F. Wang, K.L. Zhang, Y.B. Liu, X. Ding, Pitting fault detection of a wind
turbine gearbox using empirical mode decomposition, Strojniski vestnik - J.
Mech. Eng. 60 (1) (2014) 12e20.
[28] I. Daubechies, Ten Lectures on Wavelets, Ser. CBMS-NSF Regional Conference
Series in Applied Mathematics, SIAM, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1992.