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© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The high cost of wind turbine maintenance has intensified the need for reliable fault detection and condition monitoring methods. While Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems provide valuable operational data, the raw signals often contain noise, outliers, and missing or redundant entries, which can compromise analysis accuracy. This study presents a novel cluster-based outlier removal approach for SCADA data preprocessing, featuring a unique flexibility to include or exclude negative power values—a factor rarely investigated but potentially critical for fault detection performance. The method applies the K-Means++ unsupervised clustering algorithm to group data points along the wind speed–power curve. The number of clusters is determined heuristically using the elbow method, while outliers are identified through Mahalanobis distance with thresholds derived from Chebyshev’s inequality theorem. The approach was validated using SCADA data from a wind farm in Portugal and further assessed with a CUSUM test-based structural change detection method to study how preprocessing choices—outlier thresholds (5% vs. 1%) and inclusion/exclusion of negative power values—affect early fault identification. Results demonstrate reliable fault detection up to 14 days before failure, retaining over 99% of the original dataset. This work provides key insights into preprocessing impacts on model reliability and offers an open-source Python implementation for reproducibility.

Details

Title
A Cluster-Based Filtering Approach to SCADA Data Preprocessing for Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection
Author
Kijanowski Krzysztof  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Barszcz Tomasz; Dao Phong Ba  VIAFID ORCID Logo 
First page
5954
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
19961073
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3275512299
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.