This study proposes a method for detecting possible faults in wind turbine systems in advance such that the
operating state of the fan can be changed or appropriate maintenance steps taken. In the proposed method, a chaotic
synchronisation detection method is used to transform the vibration signal into a chaos error distribution diagram. The
centroid (chaotic eye) of this diagram is then taken as the characteristic for fault diagnosis purposes. Finally, a grey
prediction model is used to predict the trajectory of the feature changes, and an extension theory pattern recognition
technique is applied to diagnose the fault. Notably, the use of the chaotic eye as the fault diagnosis characteristic
reduces the number of extracted features required, and therefore greatly reduces both the computation time and the
hardware implementation cost. From the experimental results, it is shown that the fault diagnosis rate of the proposed
method exceeds 98%. Moreover, it is shown that for oil leaks in the gear accelerator system, the proposed method
achieves a detection accuracy of 90%, whereas the multilayer neural network method achieves a maximum accuracy of
just 80%.
