Active vibration-based structural health monitoring system for wind turbine blade: Demonstration on an operating Vestas V27 wind turbine

This study presents a structural health monitoring system that is able to detect structural defects of wind turbine blade such as cracks, leading/trailing-edge opening, or delamination. It is shown that even small defects of at least 15 cm size can be detected remotely without stopping the wind turbine. The structural health monitoring system presented is vibration-based: mechanical energy is artificially introduced by means of an electromechanical actuator, whose plunger periodically hits the blade. The induced vibrations propagate along the blade and are picked up by accelerometers mounted along the blade. The vibrations in mid-range frequencies are utilized: this range is above the frequencies excited by blade–wind interaction, ensuring a good signal-to-noise ratio. At the same time, the corresponding wavelength is short enough to deliver required damage detection resolution and long enough to be able to propagate the entire blade length. This article demonstrates the system on a Vestas V27 wind turbine. One blade of the wind turbine was equipped with the system, and a 3.5-month monitoring campaign was conducted while the turbine was operating normally. During the campaign, a defect—a trailing-edge opening—was artificially introduced into the blade and its size was gradually increased from the original 15 to 45 cm. Using a semi-supervised learning algorithm, the system was able to detect even the smallest amount of damage while the wind turbine was operating under different weather conditions. This article provides detailed information about the instrumentation and the measurement campaign and explains the damage detection algorithm.