Wireless monitoring of structural components of wind turbines including tower and foundations

Only few large wind turbines contain an extensive structural health monitoring (SHM) system. Such SHM systems could provide deeper insight into the real load history of a wind turbine along its standard lifetime of 20 years and support a justified extension of operation beyond the original intended period. This paper presents a new concept of a wireless SHM system based on acceleration measurement sensor nodes to permanently record acceleration of the tower structure at different heights. Exploitation of acceleration data and its referring position on the turbine tower enables calculation of vibration frequencies, their amplitudes and subsequently eigenmodes. Tower heights of 100 m and more are within the transmission range of wireless nodes, enabling a complete surveillance of the tower in three dimensions without the need for long cabling or electric signal amplification. Mounting of the sensor nodes on the tower is not limited to a few positions by the presence of an electric cable anymore. Still a comparison between data recorded by wireless sensors and data recorded by high-resolution wire-based sensors shows that the present resolution of the wireless sensors has to be improved to record accelerations more accurately and thus analyze vibration frequencies more precisely.

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