A new noise-controlled second-order enhanced stochastic resonance method with its application in wind turbine drivetrain fault diagnosis

Condition monitoring of a wind turbine is important to extend the wind turbine system's reliability and useful life. However, in many cases, to extract feature components becomes challenging and the applicability of information drops down due to the large amount of noise. Stochastic resonance (SR), used as a method of utilising noise to amplify weak signals in nonlinear systems, can detect weak signals overwhelmed in the noise. Therefore, a new noise-controlled second-order enhanced SR method based on the Morlet wavelet transform is proposed to extract fault feature for wind turbine vibration signals in the present study. The second-order SR method can obtain better denoising effect and higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of resonance output by means of twice integral transform compared with the traditional SR method. Morlet wavelet transform can obtain finer frequency partitions and overcome the frequency aliasing compared with the classical wavelet transform. Therefore, through Morlet wavelet transform, the noise intensity of different scales can be adjusted to realize the resonance detection of weak periodic signal whatever it is a low-frequency signal or high-frequency signal. Thus the method is well-suited for enhancement of weak fault identification, whose effectiveness has been verified by the practical vibration signals carrying fault information. Finally, the proposed method has been applied to extract feature of the looseness fault of shaft coupling of wind turbine successfully. •An improved second-order enhanced SR method for weak signal detection is proposed.•The noise tuning method based on Morlet wavelet transform is used to realize SR.•The method can detect weak low-frequency or high-frequency periodic signal.•The method can effectively process single-frequency or multi-frequency signal.•The superiority of the proposed method is verified by experiments and application.