# Misalignment Fault Prediction of Wind Turbines Based on Combined Forecasting Model
## 1 Introduction  
The problem of energy shortage and environmental degradation in the world is becoming more and more serious. Wind energy as environmentally friendly and renewable energy has attracted increasing attention [1]. The cumulative installed capacity of global wind power has also steadily increased in recent years [2]. Because wind turbines are often located in remote areas and the working environment is poor, many wind turbines often fail during operation, which greatly reduces their work quality and efficiency and increases maintenance costs [3]. Therefore, how to effectively decrease the risk of fault during the operation of wind turbines has become a difficult problem. At present, doubly-fed wind turbines (DFWT) have become the main units for large-capacity wind farms [4]. Due to installation errors, deformation after loading or frequent wind speed fluctuations, misalignment between the gearbox and the generator often happens [5]. The misalignment fault of wind turbines belongs to a latent fault [6; 7]. This is because when it happens in actual operation, the unit's operating parameters will not reach their early warning values immediately, but when the fault accumulates to a certain extent, it will seriously damage the unit's equipment and cause unit shutdown [8]. Therefore, it is necessary to predict the latent trend of misalignment, which can overcome the blindness of handling the fault and avoid more loss of human and material resources. There are many commonly used signals for mechanical fault prediction, such as vibration signals, current signals, temperature signals, pressure signals, etc. [9; 10; 11; 12; 13]. When the equipment fails, theamplitude of the mechanical vibration will increase [14]. Therefore, vibration signals often more quickly and directly reflect the operational status of the equipment. Compared with vibration signals, the current signals can be more easily obtained and are not easily affected by noise. Thus, in this paper, the vibration signal and current signal are regarded as the signal sources to research the misalignment fault of wind turbines. After the fault signals are obtained, a reasonable and effective prediction method is necessary for accurately predicting the future operational status of the equipment faults. At present, many scholars have studied the prediction techniques for different types of faults [15; 16; 17]. In order to determine a suitable forecasting model of misalignment fault in wind turbines, the commonly used prediction methods are summarized in Table 1.  
For the complex non-linear system, a single forecasting model is not enough to obtain ideal prediction results. Therefore, in order to predict the mechanical fault accurately, the combined forecasting model has attracted more and more attention from scholars. For example, in Ref. [18], the improved Grey Model (GM (1,1)) and the Back Propagation (BP) neural network optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA) were used as the single forecasting models. The minimum sum of error squares was used as the combination principle to assign appropriate weight coefficients to them. The combined forecasting model had a smaller prediction error. Ref. [19] proposed a calculation method of combined weight coefficients for the unequal weight of error. The combined forecasting model was constructed by Multivariate Grey Model (MGM (1, \(n\))) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) neural network. The combined forecasting model was more suitable for predicting the trend of the bearing fault. In Ref. [20], according to the minimum variance principle, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and grey model were combined to make up the shortcomings of single forecasting models. In Ref. [21], SVM was used as the combiner of forecasting models. The Kalman filter, BP neural network and SVM model were used as single forecasting models. The prediction errors of the single forecasting models were larger than that of the combined model. In Ref. [22], the BP neural network was used to determine the weight coefficients of each single forecasting model.