Review of the Typical Damage and Damage-Detection Methods of Large Wind Turbine Blades

Natural Frequency Transmissibility for Detection of Cracks in Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Blades

Defects on horizontal axis wind turbine blades are difficult to identify and monitor with conventional forms of non-destructive examination due to the blade's large size and limited accessibility during continuous operation. This article examines both strain and acceleration transmissibility as methods of continuous damage detection on wind turbine blades. A scaled 117 cm offshore wind turbine blade was first designed, 3D printed, and modelled numerically in ANSYS. Transverse cracks were deliberately introduced to the blade at 10 cm intervals along its leading edge. Subsequent changes in the transmissibility, relative to an undamaged baseline model, were measured using different variable combinations at the blade's first three natural frequencies. Experimental results indicated that strain transmissibility was able to locate a 1.0 cm defect at a range of 70-110 cm from the blade hub using the amplitudes of the first natural frequency of vibration. The numerical model was able to simulate the strain experimental results and was determined to be valid for future defect characterization. Acceleration transmissibility was unable to experimentally identify defects sized at 1.0 cm and below but was able to identify 1.0 cm sized defects numerically. It was concluded that transmissibility is viable for continuous damage detection on blades but that further research into other defect types and locations is required prior to conducting full-scale testing.

Inspection of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Using Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Literature Review and Trends

Operations and maintenance (O&M) of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) require regular inspection activities to predict, detect, and troubleshoot faults at high altitudes and in harsh environments such as strong winds, waves, and tides. Their costs typically account for more than 30% of the lifetime cost due to high labor costs and long downtime. Different inspection methods, including manual inspection, permanent sensors, climbing robots, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), can be employed to fulfill O&M missions. The UAVs, as an enabling technology, can deal with time and space constraints easily and complete tasks in a cost-effective and efficient manner, which have been widely used in different industries in recent years. This study provides valuable insights into the existing applications of UAVs in FOWT inspection, highlighting their potential to reduce the inspection cost and thereby reduce the cost of energy production. The article introduces the rationale for applying UAVs to FOWT inspection and examines the current technical status, research gaps, and future directions in this field by conducting a comprehensive literature review over the past 10 years. This paper will also include a review of UAVs' applications in other infrastructure inspections, such as onshore wind turbines, bridges, power lines, solar power plants, and offshore oil and gas fields, since FOWTs are still in the early stages of development. Finally, the trends of UAV technology and its application in FOWTs inspection are discussed, leading to our future research direction.

Acoustic-Signal-Based Damage Detection of Wind Turbine Blades-A Review

Monitoring and maintaining the health of wind turbine blades has long been one of the challenges facing the global wind energy industry. Detecting damage to a wind turbine blade is important for planning blade repair, avoiding aggravated blade damage, and extending the sustainability of blade operation. This paper firstly introduces the existing wind turbine blade detection methods and reviews the research progress and trends of monitoring of wind turbine composite blades based on acoustic signals. Compared with other blade damage detection technologies, acoustic emission (AE) signal detection technology has the advantage of time lead. It presents the potential to detect leaf damage by detecting the presence of cracks and growth failures and can also be used to determine the location of leaf damage sources. The detection technology based on the blade aerodynamic noise signal has the potential of blade damage detection, as well as the advantages of convenient sensor installation and real-time and remote signal acquisition. Therefore, this paper focuses on the review and analysis of wind power blade structural integrity detection and damage source location technology based on acoustic signals, as well as the automatic detection and classification method of wind power blade failure mechanisms combined with machine learning algorithm. In addition to providing a reference for understanding wind power health detection methods based on AE signals and aerodynamic noise signals, this paper also points out the development trend and prospects of blade damage detection technology. It has important reference value for the practical application of non-destructive, remote, and real-time monitoring of wind power blades.

Cloud Based Fault Diagnosis by Convolutional Neural Network as Time-Frequency RGB Image Recognition of Industrial Machine Vibration with Internet of Things Connectivity

The human-centric and resilient European industry called Industry 5.0 requires a long lifetime of machines to reduce electronic waste. The appropriate way to handle this problem is to apply a diagnostic system capable of remotely detecting, isolating, and identifying faults. The authors present usage of HTTP/1.1 protocol for batch processing as a fault diagnosis server. Data are sent by microcontroller HTTP client in JSON format to the diagnosis server. Moreover, the MQTT protocol was used for stream (micro batch) processing from microcontroller client to two fault diagnosis clients. The first fault diagnosis MQTT client uses only frequency data for evaluation. The authors' enhancement to standard fast Fourier transform (FFT) was their usage of sliding discrete Fourier transform (rSDFT, mSDFT, gSDFT, and oSDFT) which allows recursively updating the spectrum based on a new sample in the time domain and previous results in the frequency domain. This approach allows to reduce the computational cost. The second approach of the MQTT client for fault diagnosis uses short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to transform IMU 6 DOF sensor data into six spectrograms that are combined into an RGB image. All three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope data are used to obtain a time-frequency RGB image. The diagnosis of the machine is performed by a trained convolutional neural network suitable for RGB image recognition. Prediction result is returned as a JSON object with predicted state and probability of each state. For HTTP, the fault diagnosis result is sent in response, and for MQTT, it is send to prediction topic. Both protocols and both proposed approaches are suitable for fault diagnosis based on the mechanical vibration of the rotary machine and were tested in demonstration.

Vision-Based Damage Detection for One-Fixed-End Structures Based on Aligned Marker Space and Decision Fusion

It is possible to detect damage in structures based only on vision-system-based assessment of their deformation shape under load. There is, however, a gap between available methods designed to detect damage in beam-like structures and engineering needs for monitoring structures of many different shapes. In this article, a new Aligned Marker Space method of morphing vision data is introduced. The method allows damage detection of any engineering object with one fixed support as if it were a cantilever beam. The paper also presents a new fusion technique to combine the results of several damage-detection methods for an increase in accuracy and sensitivity. The methods are tested based on numerical simulation of various structures, a blender-based simulation, and a set of practical experiments in which crane structures are subjected to damage of different sizes and locations. The optimization of damage detection methods' metaparemeters is performed using an evolutionary algorithm designed to find the Pareto front of the solutions. The assessment of the influence of different factors, like camera position, damage position, or repetition of the experiment, is provided.