A Directional Monitoring Approach of Sequential Incomplete Wind Power Curves with Copula-based Variational Inference

Wind turbines often work under complex conditions which result in performance degradation. Accurate performance degradation monitoring is essential to ensure the reliable operation of wind turbines and reduce the maintenance costs. Wind turbine power curve monitoring is an effective way to detect performance degradation. However, due to the intermittency and fluctuation of wind speed, the wind speed range varies at different time periods, making power curves difficult to compare. Motivated by this, we proposed copula-based variational inference framework and used it to establish a sequential incomplete wind power curve estimation algorithm. First, a monotone power curve is constructed based on copula-based variational inference and integrated spline regression model. Besides, the prior distribution of model parameters are sequentially updated. Then, a directional control chart based on a new statistic named KLdivergence factor is constructed to monitor wind turbine performance degradation. The real data of a wind farm in the east of the United Kingdom shows that the proposed method can both improve the accuracy of wind turbine power curve modeling and monitor wind turbine performance degradation more precisely and comprehensively than the existing approaches.