Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Structural Health Monitoring of Wind
Turbine Blades
Hui Li, Wensong Zhou and Jinlong Xu
Abstract Wind turbine blades usually achieve a very long operating life of
20-30 years. During their operation, the blades encounter complex loading with a
high number of cycles as well as severe weather. All of these factors result in
accumulated damage, acceleration of fatigue damage, and even sudden blade
failure, which can cause catastrophic damage to the wind turbine. In recent years,
many structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques, including global and local
methods, have been developed and applied as important and valid tools to detect
the damage of wind turbine blades. This chapter provides a comprehensive review
and analysis on the state of the art of SHM for blades. Then, the SHM techniques
are described in detail. For the global method, this chapter discusses mainly the
vibration-based damage detection problem for wind turbine blades given the
rotation effects. For the local methods, a fatigue damage detection system used for
wind turbine blade is developed using high spatial resolution differential pulse-
width pair Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (DPP-BOTDA) sensing system
and PZT sensors is introduced to detect the tiny damage under static loading.
Keywords Wind turbine blades
Damage detection
Vibration-based method
DPP-BOTDA
PZT
