Imbalance Fault Detection Based on the Integrated Analysis Strategy for Marine Current Turbines under Variable Current Speed

The conversion of marine current energy into electricity with marine current turbines (MCTs) promises renewable energy. However, the reliability and power quality of marine current turbines are degraded due to marine biological attachments on the blades. To benefit from all the information embedded in the three phases, we created a fault feature that was the derivative of the current vector modulus in a Concordia reference frame. Moreover, because of the varying marine current speed, fault features were non-stationary. A transformation based on new adaptive proportional sampling frequency (APSF) transformed them into stationary ones. The fault indicator was derived from the amplitude of the shaft rotating frequency, which was itself derived from its power spectrum. The method was validated with data collected from a test bed composed of a marine current turbine coupled to a 230 W permanent magnet synchronous generator. The results showed the efficiency of the method to detect an introduced imbalance fault with an additional mass of 80–220 g attached to blades. In comparison to methods that use a single piece of electrical information (phase current or voltage), the fault indicator based on the three currents was found to be, on average, 2.2 times greater. The results also showed that the fault indicator increased monotonically with the fault severity, with a 1.8 times-higher variation rate, as well as that the method is robust for the flow current speed that varies from 0.95 to 1.3 m/s.