Fault diagnosis of floating offshore wind turbine based on bidirectional long short-term memory networks with sliding window

Owing to its ability to harvest more power in deeper waters than other types of offshore wind turbines, the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) has attracted significant interest from both academics and industry. However, deterioration in system performance and unscheduled shutdowns will significantly increase operation and maintenance costs. To avoid system damage and ensure operation safety, there is a great demand for developing FOWT fault diagnosis to detect and identify faults as early as feasible. Due to the enormous complexity of FOWT including dynamics and nonlinearity, effective FOWT fault diagnosis poses a significant challenge. This paper develops a novel FOWT fault diagnosis method using bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) with sliding window. Firstly, the dynamics are embedded by stacking time-dependent measurements using the sliding window technique. Then, the augmented data is fed into a BiLSTM network to exploit the nonlinearity of FOWT. Consequently, a softmax classifier is used for fault diagnosis. A high-fidelity 10 MW spar FOWT benchmark based on the NREL Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence (FAST) model is used to validate the capability and effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other related methods in diagnosing critical faults in FOWTs under various operating conditions.