Detection of Jacket Offshore Wind Turbine Structural Damage using an 1D-Convolutional Neural Network with a Support Vector Machine Layer

Abstract

Because offshore wind turbines, particularly their foundations, operate in hostile environments, implementing a structural health monitoring system is one of the best ways to monitor their condition, schedule maintenance, and predict possible fatal failures at lower costs. A novel strategy for detecting damage in offshore wind turbine jacket foundations is developed in this work, based on a vibration monitoring methodology that reshapes the data into a multichannel array, with as many channels as correlated sensors with the predicted variable, a 1-D deep convolutional neural network to extract temporal features from the monitored data, and a support vector machine as a final classification layer. The obtained model allows the detection of three types of bar states: healthy bar, cracked bar, and bar with an unlocked bolt.