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An optically based sensing system that can measure the displacement and strain over essentially the entire area of a utility-scale blade leads to a measurement system that can significantly reduce the time and cost associated with traditional instrumentation. This paper evaluates the performance of conventional three dimensional digital image correlation (3D DIC) and three dimensional point tracking (3DPT) approaches over the surface of wind turbine blades and proposes a multi-camera measurement system using dynamic spatial data stitching. The potential advantages for the proposed approach include: (1) full-field measurement distributed over a very large area, (2) the elimination of timeconsuming wiring and expensive sensors, and (3) the need for large-channel data acquisition systems. There are several challenges associated with extending the capability of a standard 3D DIC system to measure entire surface of utility scale blades to extract distributed strain, deflection, and modal parameters. This paper only tries to address some of the difficulties including: (1) assessing the accuracy of the 3D DIC system to measure full-field distributed strain and displacement over the large area, (2) understanding the geometrical constraints associated with a wind turbine testing facility (e.g. lighting, working distance, and speckle pattern size), (3) evaluating the performance of the dynamic stitching method to combine two different fields of view by extracting modal parameters from aligned point clouds, and (4) determining the feasibility of employing an output-only system identification to estimate modal parameters of a utility scale wind turbine blade from optically measured data. Within the current work, the results of an optical measurement (one stereo-vision system) performed on a large area over a 50-meter utility-scale blade subjected to quasistatic and cyclic loading are presented. The blade certification and testing is typically performed using International Electro-Technical Commission standard (IEC 61400-23). For static tests, the blade is pulled in either flap-wise or edgewise directions to measure deflection or distributed strain at a few limited locations of a large-sized blade. Additionally, the paper explores the error associated with using a multi-camera system (two stereo-vision systems) in measuring 3D displacement and extracting structural dynamic parameters on a mock set up emulating a utility-scale wind turbine blade. The results obtained in this paper reveal that the multi-camera measurement system has the potential to identify the dynamic characteristics of a very large structure.

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a b s t r a c tHealth monitoring of rotating structures such as wind turbines and helicopter rotors is generally performed using conventional sensors that provide a limited set of data at discrete locations near or on the hub. These sensors usually provide no data on the blades or inside them where failures might occur. Within this paper, an approach was used to extract the full-field dynamic strain on a wind turbine assembly subject to arbitrary loading conditions. A three-bladed wind turbine having 2.3-m long blades was placed in a semi-built-in boundary condition using a hub, a machining chuck, and a steel block. For three different test cases, the turbine was excited using (1) pluck testing, (2) random impacts on blades with three impact hammers, and (3) random excitation by a mechanical shaker. The response of the structure to the excitations was measured using threedimensional point tracking. A pair of high-speed cameras was used to measure displacement of optical targets on the structure when the blades were vibrating. The measured displacements at discrete locations were expanded and applied to the finite element model of the structure to extract the full-field dynamic strain. The results of the paper show an excellent correlation between the strain predicted using the proposed approach and the strain measured with strain-gages for each of the three loading conditions. The approach used in this paper to predict the strain showed higher accuracy than the digital image correlation technique. The new expansion approach is able to extract dynamic strain all over the entire structure, even inside the structure beyond the line of sight of the measurement system. Because the method is based on a non-contacting measurement approach, it can be readily applied to a variety of structures having different boundary and operating conditions, including rotating blades.

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