Development of an Acoustic Sensing Based SHM Technique for Wind Turbine Blades

Wind turbine blades are exposed to continuously-varying aerodynamic forces, gravitational loads, lightning strikes, and weather conditions that lead the blade damage such as leading and trailing edge splits, cracks and holes. In this study, actively-controlled acoustic sources were utilized in order to excite the blade’s cavity structure from internal. The blade damage manifests itself in changes to the acoustic cavity frequency response functions and to the blade acoustic transmission loss. Proposed research examines the use of wireless sensing approach for detecting surface damage of the blades, while they are rotating when wind turbine is operational. A subscale wind turbine was built and used for carrying out preliminary experimental studies. Sensing system and strategy was benchmarked both using computational (FEM) model of the blades as well as the experimental results in the lab.

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