Wind power market is rapidly increasing with a growth rate of 30%. Because wind turbines are becoming larger and more off-shore construction are becoming popular due to economic and environmental factors. Therefore it is becoming more challenging to physically access the wind turbine in a remote place leading to high maintenance cost. So, we need to minimize fault elements and to prevent a secondary accident at failure through monitoring to reduce maintenance costs and to increase reliability of operation.
In this thesis, ZigBee based wireless sensor nodes and network for wind turbine condition monitoring have been implemented. The wireless sensor node architecture consists of a sensor, a MCU module, and a XBee-PRO RF module. Six sensors for implementing a small scale wind turbine condition monitoring system using ZigBee have been selected, which are temperature, humidity, voltage, current, wind direction, and wind speed sensors. Signal conditioning of output signals from sensors are processed by given sensor specifications in MCU module. According to the sensor specification, signal conditioning is divided into the converting sensor output value, amplifying, and filtering etc. After signal conditioning, the signals are coded and inserted to ATmega128 by ISP. ZigBee wireless sensor nodes signals are transmitted to a central monitoring system via ZigBee routers. ZigBee block determines both of channel and baud rate, and ZigBee block is connected to PC through RS232 communication. Also, the sensor signals are collected and processed using LabVIEW program to monitor the wind turbine conveniently. Topology type of cluster tree is the most suitable for wind farm condition monitoring. However, it can have been applied in a different way depending on the situation. If scale of wind farm is so large or distance of base station is so far, it can have been communicate with a dynamically changing ad- hoc network. The administrators and users can monitor the condition of wind turbine using Visual Studio at remote site in real time over TCP/IP. Flexible ZigBee wireless sensor network technology for wind turbine condition monitoring is possible to meet the requirement of various configuration and size.