Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Drivetrains Using XGBoost-Assisted Discriminative Frequency Band Identification and a CNN–Transformer Network

Traditional wind turbine drivetrain health assessment generally depends on feature extraction guided by expert experience and prior knowledge. However, the effectiveness of this approach is often limited when such knowledge is insufficient or when fault features are obscured by high levels of ambient noise. In response to these issues, this study proposes a new data-driven framework that combines intelligent frequency band identification with a deep learning architecture. In the proposed approach, vibration signals from the bearings are transformed into their spectral representation, and the frequency spectrum is divided into multiple frequency bands. The relative importance of each band is evaluated and ranked using XGBoost, enabling the selection of the most informative features and significant dimensionality reduction. A hybrid CNN–Transformer model is then employed to combine local feature extraction with global attention mechanisms for accurate fault classification. Experimental evaluations using two open-source datasets indicate that the proposed framework achieves high classification accuracy and rapid convergence, offering a robust and computationally efficient solution for wind turbine drivetrain fault diagnosis.