Structural Health Monitoring of Research-Scale Wind Turbine Blades

This paper presents ongoing work by the authors to implement real-time structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for operational research-scale wind turbine blades. The authors have been investigating and assessing the performance of several techniques for SHM of wind turbine blades using piezoelectric active sensors. Following a series of laboratory vibration and fatigue tests, these techniques are being implemented using embedded systems developed by the authors. These embedded systems are being deployed on operating wind turbine platforms, including a 20-meter rotor diameter turbine, located in Bushland, TX, and a 4.5-meter rotor diameter turbine, located in Los Alamos, NM. The SHM approach includes measurements over multiple frequency ranges, in which diffuse ultrasonic waves are excited and recorded using an active sensing system, and the blades global ambient vibration response is recorded using a passive sensing system. These dual measurement types provide a means of correlating the effect of potential damage to changes in the global structural behavior of the blade. In order to provide a backdrop for the sensors and systems currently installed in the field, recent damage detection results for laboratory-based wind turbine blade experiments are reviewed. Our recent and ongoing experimental platforms for field tests are described, and experimental results from these field tests are presented. LA-UR-12-24691.