An Ensemble Network for High-Accuracy and Long-Term Forecasting of Icing on Wind Turbines

Freezing of wind turbines causes loss of wind-generated power. Forecasting or prediction of icing on wind turbine blades based on SCADA sensor data allows taking appropriate actions before icing occurs. This paper presents a newly developed deep learning network model named PCTG (Parallel CNN-TCN GRU) for the purpose of high-accuracy and long-term prediction of icing on wind turbine blades. This model combines three networks, the CNN, TCN, and GRU, in order to incorporate both the temporal aspect of SCADA time-series data as well as the dependencies of SCADA variables. The experimentations conducted by using this model and SCADA data from three wind turbines in a wind farm have generated average prediction accuracies of about 97% for prediction horizons of up to 2 days ahead. The developed model is shown to maintain at least 95% prediction accuracy for long prediction horizons of up to 22 days ahead. Furthermore, for another wind farm SCADA dataset, it is shown that the developed PCTG model achieves over 99% icing prediction accuracy 10 days ahead.