Fault Diagnosis of Wind Energy Conversion Systems Using Gaussian Process Regression-based Multi-Class Random Forest

This work proposes a new fault diagnosis approach for a wind energy conversion (WEC) system. The proposed technique merges the benefits of feature extraction based on Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Multi-Class Random Forest (MCRF)-based fault classification where instances are classified into one or more classes. In the developed GPR-MCRF approach, the nonlinear statistical features including the mean vector M_GPRand the variance matrix C_GPRare computed using the GPR model with aim of extracting the most relevant features from the WEC system. Then, these features are introduced to the RF classifier for classification and diagnosis purposes. Therefore, the application of the GPR-MCRF technique for WEC systems aims to enhance the use of the classical raw data-based MCRF and diagnosis accuracy. Three kinds of faults (wear-out, open-circuit, and short-circuit faults) are considered in this work. Different case studies are investigated in order to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the developed technique compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The obtained results show that the the developed GPR-MCRF technique is an effective feature extraction and fault diagnosis technique for WEC systems.