Wind Turbine Power Converter Architectures and Faults: Proposal of a Hardware-Independent Detection Approach

Abstract

Wind energy is rapidly becoming one of the pillars of clean energy production. In 2023, wind power contributed to almost 8% of the global electricity generation. However, the harsh and variable environments to which wind turbines are exposed make them prone to electrical, mechanical, structural, and control system faults. This reliability issue is one of the main challenges of wind energy production. From an electrical perspective, components such as generators, power converters, transformers, and switchgear are the leading contributors to turbine unavailability and costly maintenance. Among these, power converters represent a significant portion of electrical downtime, making them a critical focus for improving system reliability. This article reviews wind turbine converter architectures and examines two representative faults to highlight the dependency of fault detection methods on different architectures. Building on this foundation, we introduce a new architecture-independent fault detection and classification concept. This paper is designed to facilitate future research and practical applications.