LabVIEW Based Approach For Monitoring Of Large Scale Offshore Wind Power Systems

In recent years, traditional fossil fuel is suffering reserves less and environmental pollution two major problems. Therefore, wind energy as a clean and renewable energy is now been rapidly developed. With the technology of onshore wind become more mature, Countries around the world began to pay more attention to offshore wind. However, offshore wind power suffering harsher environment, increased installation and maintenance difficulty of the wind turbine, leading to a larger maintenance costs, all of these aspects hindered the development of offshore wind. Therefore, fully functional and stable of monitoring system has a critical effect to reduce operating and maintenance costs and ensuring wind turbines safe and stable operation.However, the current offshore wind turbines are mostly used existing onshore monitoring programs, and offshore wind farms almost adopt wired communication method to transmit the monitoring parameters. However, harsh marine environment increased the difficulty and costs of wiring, and it is not conducive to the expansion and maintenance of offshore wind farms. Aiming at the existing problems of the present monitoring system, this paper researched remote offshore wind monitoring system based on ZigBee wireless sensor networks and GPRS technology, and adopted virtual instrument LabVIEW as monitoring platform software to monitoring wind turbine healthy and operation status, aim to decrease its operation and maintenance cost.Main work of this paper can be divided into three parts.Firstly, analyzed the common fault components and fault types of offshore wind turbine and determined the monitoring parameters, critical monitoring points and the type of sensors and its configuration, and designed the overall remote monitoring system framework for offshore wind.Secondly, compared and analyzed the performance and applications of several common communication technologies and considering the characteristics of offshore wind farms, combined the advantages of ZigBee and GPRS technology, designed and built a remote wireless communication system including the design and implementation of ZigBee wireless sensor networks and gateways.Finally, used LabVIEW as its remote monitoring center, designed and realized the monitoring platform according to modular concept, including LabVIEW and database connectivity, data display module, historical data query module, data analysis and process module. At last, summarized the main content and research work of this paper, pointed out the inadequacies of the present system and provided the way to improve the remote monitoring system.