Acoustic inspection system with unmanned aerial vehicles for wind turbines structure health monitoring

Abstract

Wind energy is considered as one of the most important renewable energies in the world, employing larger and more complex wind turbines. They need novel condition monitoring systems to ensure the reliability, availability, safety and maintainability of the main components of the wind turbines. It leads to early fault detection, increasing the productivity and minimizing the maintenance costs and downtimes. This article proposes a novel non-destructive testing system to analyse acoustically rotatory devices of wind turbines. It captures the noise emitted by the devices using an acoustic condition monitoring system embedded in an unmanned aerial vehicle. The signal acquired is sent to ground computer station for recording and analysing the data. It uses a test rig, previously validated, to carry out a set of experiments to simulate the main faults. A signal processing method is done by wavelet transforms that filters and analyses the energy patterns of the signals. The results are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively considering different scenarios. A statistical analysis is developed to compare the numerical results provided by different wavelet transform families and convolutional neural network. It is concluded that Symlets and Daubechies families report equivalent results for this case study. The accuracies of the results are more than 75%, reaching up to 100%. The approach is validated employing Friedman test.

Design of a system for diagnosing the technical condition of a gas pumping unit based on the analysis of existing methods of processing vibroacoustic signals

“…Через малу тривалість роботи вітрових турбін не було отримано даних про вихід з робочого стану, тому виникають сумніви про можливість визначення дефектів запропонованою системою. Обробка акустичних сигналів вітрової турбіни, отриманих з безпілотного літаючого апарата, наведена у роботі [2]. Використано два види вейвлет-перетворень (Симлет та Дубеші) для отримання точного результату та згорткову нейромережу для обробки результатів перетворень.…”

A techno-economic model for avoiding conflicts of interest between owners of offshore wind farms and maintenance suppliers

“…To maintain different availabilities at appropriate values, the maintenance supplier can follow different maintenance strategies and techniques [44,45]. The main types of maintenance are corrective maintenance, also called unscheduled or failure-based maintenance, which is carried out when faults or failures are detected in a WT [37]; preventive maintenance, where specific maintenance activities are regularly performed on components to prevent breakdown of the system; and predictive maintenance, where system data are acquired and processed to detect anomalies and determine actual maintenance requirements.…”

Symbiotic System of Systems Design for Safe and Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Offshore Wind Farms

“…Used as an inspection RAS platform, multirotor drones can perform complex sensing and manipulation tasks. As a result, UAVs represent a maturing method of asset integrity, with significant uptake from the offshore and onshore energy sectors for pipeline, platform, gas flare and power line network inspection, in addition to search and rescue roles [38]- [40].…”