Wireless High-Resolution Acceleration Measurements for Structural Health Monitoring of Wind Turbine Towers

Structural health monitoring (SHM) will be pivotal for safe and economic operation of wind turbines. Timely discovery of changes within the structure and means of prediction of required maintenance will reduce production costs of electricity and catastrophic failures. Long-term structural acceleration recording can support damage detection on turbine towers and document progression of fatigue. Conventional acceleration recordings are based on wired sensor nodes at fixed positions with privileged accessibility and electric power supply. However, such positions might be near vibration nodes and not necessarily experience the maximum vibration amplitude. Shifts in eigenfrequencies can be an indicator of changes in structural stiffness, hence damage, but also be caused by environmental effects, e.g., temperature. Damages generate local effects while the structure’s vibration spectrum is a global evaluation. If a sensor is close to the location of damage, the probability of detection is increased. Wireless sensors powered by batteries are advantageous for this task as they are independent of cabling for power supply and data transmission. Such monitoring of turbine tower structures is not common in practice and requires new data-enabled techniques to discover deviations from the optimal way of wind turbine operation. This paper proposes a new approach using wireless high-resolution acceleration measurement sensor nodes, exploiting the vibration response of wind turbine towers. Influences of acceleration resolution and sensor node locations onto the accuracy of eigenfrequency determination are demonstrated. A comparison between acceleration recordings by wireless sensor nodes and their wired counterparts is presented to prove the equivalence of the wireless sensing method. Finally, new data compression techniques used with the sensor nodes are discussed to reduce wireless transmission to a minimum.

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