Editorial: Wind turbine fault and damage diagnosis and prognosis

To remain competitive, wind turbines must be reliable machines with efficient and effective maintenance strategies. Thus, it is essential to develop robust and cost-effective prognostic and health management strategies, both in terms of their structure and their components.

On the one hand, the purpose of wind turbine structural health monitoring (SHM) is to detect, locate, and characterize structural damage, so that maintenance operations can be performed in due time. SHM has been widely applied in various engineering sectors due to its ability to respond to adverse structural changes, improving structural reliability and life cycle management. In the near future, SHM has the potential to be a wind energy harvester, in particular for offshore wind turbines. On the other hand, fault diagnosis and prognosis strategies based on condition based maintenance for the different systems (gearbox, main bearing, generator, etc.) of the wind turbine are crucial. Vibration-based condition monitoring is a well-established strategy, but it usually relies on high-sampled data (>10
kHz) leading to a large amount of data from a large number of sensors. Finding patterns in such multivariable datasets is a challenge under the variety of operational modes and environmental conditions that wind turbines are subject to.