A Review of Nanocarbon-Based Solutions for the Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Parts Used in Renewable Energies

Abstract

The growing demands for electrical energy, especially renewable, is boosting the development of wind turbines equipped with longer composite blades. To reduce the maintenance cost of such huge composite parts, the structural health monitoring (SHM) is an approach to anticipate and/or follow the structural behaviour along time. Apart from the development of traditional non-destructive testing methods, in order to reduce the use of intrusive instrumentation there is a growing interest for the development of “self-sensing materials”. An interesting route to achieve this, can be to introduce carbon nanofillers such as nanotubes (CNT) in the composite structures, which enables to create systems that are sensitive to both strain and damage. This review aims at updating the state of the art of this topic so far. A first overview of the existing SHM techniques for thermoset based wind turbine blades composites is presented. Then, the use of self-sensing materials for strain and damage sensing is presented. Different strategies are overviewed and discussed, from the design of conductive composites such as carbon fibres reinforced polymers, to the elaboration of conductive nano-reinforced polymer composites. The origins of sensing mechanisms along with the percolation theory applied to nanofillers dispersed in polymer matrices are also detailed.

A Near-Optimal Energy Management Mechanism Considering QoS and Fairness Requirements in Tree Structure Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Network data are usually processed by the sink nodes or relay nodes, which only sends data that is relevant to the user. High-level nodes are located closer to the cloud data center and consume more energy than lower-level nodes due to their high usage for data aggregation [ 6 ]. Thus, sensor nodes optimize several variables, including the amount of data flow, the transmission power level, and the activation of each sensor to minimize energy consumption.…”

“…The proposed approach will apply to various application environments and sink node types. In the point of dynamic WSN, some related studies have begun to focus on mobile sink nodes in recent years [ 6 , 7 ] and find optimal roving paths for robot sink nodes [ 8 ]. It solves the limited energy problem of traditional sensors.…”

A Review of In-Service Coating Health Monitoring Technologies: Towards “Smart” Neural-Like Networks for Condition-Based Preventive Maintenance

“…Structural health monitoring (SHM) refers to a solution that was developed to characterise the structural integrity of a material throughout its service lifetime [13], most often for preventive and damage-alerting purposes. SHM has been used in large capital infrastructures, such as aerospace vehicles [14][15][16], reinforced concrete [17][18][19][20][21], pipelines [22,23] and windmill power generators [24,25], among others.…”