Wind turbine blade health monitoring with piezoceramic-based wireless sensor network

Abstract

In this paper, a piezoceramic-based wireless sensor network (WSN) was developed for health monitoring of wind turbine blades with active sensing approach. The WSN system has an access point that coordinates the network and connects to a PC to control the wireless nodes. One wireless node functions as an actuator to excite an embedded piezoceramic patch with desired guided waves. The remaining wireless nodes function as sensors to detect and transmit the wave responses at distributed locations. The damage status inside the blade was evaluated through the analysis of the sensor signals. Based on wavelet packet analysis results, a damage index and a damage matrix were developed to evaluate the damage status at different locations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a static loading test and a wind tunnel test were performed in the Laboratory of Joint Wind Tunnel and Wave Flume at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China. Experimental results show that damage in wind turbine blades can be detected and evaluated by the proposed approach.

Impedance-Based Non-Destructive Testing Method Combined with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Structural Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructures

“…The method is known as the EMI technique, first proposed by Liang et al [4]. Currently, this technique requires one to permanently attach a PZT transducer onto the surface of the target structure, usually in 10 mm square sizes for performing the NDE method [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Electrical impedance of the attached PZT transducer is usually measured using equipment such as 4294A (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, USA) costing up to 50,000 USD, or the AD5933 evaluation board (Analog Devices, Norwood, MA, USA) costing less than 100 USD, which is light enough for a drone to carry.…”

Structural health monitoring of offshore wind turbines: A review through the Statistical Pattern Recognition Paradigm

“…Even though WSN have been proven to be applicable to OWFs [80], they have the disadvantage of the high amount of power needed by the sensors, which had been tried to be diminished with an increased interest in data telemetry with energy harvesting [161,162]. In order to provide enough power to the sensors without using batteries, piezoelectric, thermoelectric and photovoltaic energy harvesting techniques were assessed in [163], on a cross section of a CX-100 WT blade.…”

A survey of health monitoring systems for wind turbines

“…Wireless sensors for blades have been proposed [131], and commercial blade monitoring systems frequently use wireless communications between the nacelle and the DAU housed in the hub. However, these systems have not addressed the most difficult challenges of using multihop WSNs with blade monitoring, such as finding a sustainable power source for sensor nodes, or a solution for placement of nodes such that they can be accessed for maintenance, yet do not interfere with blade aerodynamics or structural integrity.…”