Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Yaw System Based on Self-Attention–Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

Addressing the challenges and significant risks associated with diagnosing faults in wind turbine yaw systems, along with the typically low diagnostic accuracy, this study introduces a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network augmented by a self-attention mechanism (SAM) as a novel fault diagnosis technique for wind turbine yaw systems. The method integrates the automatic weighting capability of the self-attention mechanism on input features with the advantage of LSTM in processing time series data, thereby effectively capturing key information and long-term dependencies in the operating data of the yawing system. This combination enhances the accuracy of fault feature extraction to more accurately identify various types of fault modes within the yawing system. Six types of feature parameters are extracted from the raw data collected by the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system of the wind turbine and are utilized as inputs for the diagnostic model. These parameters are then fed into the self-attention–LSTM neural network model to diagnose the health status of the yaw system, including yaw bearing damage, yaw gearbox failure, yaw motor failure, and sensor failure. The experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of LSTM fault diagnosis, when enhanced with the self-attention mechanism, can reach 98.67% with an appropriate amount of training samples, verifying its significant advantages in terms of accuracy and stability of fault diagnosis. The proposed fault diagnosis method exhibits a better model fitting effect, strong generalization ability, and high accuracy compared to other methods, providing robust support for the reliable operation and maintenance of wind turbines.