Damage identification of wind turbine blades using an adaptive method for compressive beamforming based on the generalized minimax-concave penalty function

Abstract Wind turbine blades are critical components in wind energy generation, and blade health management is a challenging issue for the operation and maintenance of wind turbines. In this paper, an adaptive method is developed to identify blade damages based on the microphone array and compressive beamforming, and global and remote health assessment can be accomplished. In this method, the generalized minimax-concave penalty function is employed to enhance sparse recovery capacities, and step-sizes in computation processes are adjusted adaptively to adapt to variational conditions. Besides, potential damage locations are extracted in coarse acoustic maps to improve convergence rates. Numerical simulations show that high spatial resolutions can be achieved by the proposed method, and the computation time for solving acoustic inverse problems is less than using existing algorithms, especially with low-frequency sources. Moreover, experiments are conducted with a small-scale wind turbine. Results demonstrate that several damages in operating blades can be precisely recognized with high efficiencies, and the deterioration of acoustic maps induced by improper step-sizes can be avoided. The proposed method provides a promising way for in-situ health monitoring of wind turbine blades.