The Design and Ground Test Verification of an Energy-Efficient Wireless System for the Fatigue Monitoring of Wind Turbine Blades Based on Bistable Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

Abstract

A wireless monitoring system based on piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) is presented to provide fatigue data of wind turbine blades in operation. The system comprises three subsystems, each respectively providing the following functions: (i) the conversion of mechanical to electric energy by exploiting the bistable vibration of a composite beam with piezoelectric patches in post-buckling, (ii) harvesting the converted energy by means of a modified, commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) circuit to feed a LiPo battery and (iii) the battery-powered acquisition and wireless transmission of sensory signals to the cloud to be elaborated upon by the end-user. The system was verified with ground tests under representative operation conditions, which demonstrated the fulfillment of the design requirements. The measurements indicated that the system provided 23% of the required power for fully autonomous operation when subjected to white noise base excitation of 1 g acceleration in the range of 1–20 Hz.