Effective methods for structural health monitoring of critical zones of scalable wind turbine blades

Abstract

The most important part of wind turbine is the blade that must be tested during fabrication and functioning when can be damaged by moisture absorption, fatigue, wind gusts or lightning strikes. The common defects in turbine blades may be faulty microscopic and mesoscopic appeared in matrix, broken fibers can also appear and develop under moderated loads, or cracks and delaminations due to low energy impacts, etc. The paper presents the results obtained from testing and monitoring of a scalable wind turbine blade (WTB) using different sensors placed on critical location, which were determined by finite element method (FEM) simulation. A comparison between the complementary methods is carried out in order to choose the most efficient method as quality/price ratio.