Structural health monitoring for wind turbine foundations

Structural integrity monitoring of onshore wind turbine concrete foundations

Crack Monitoring of Operational Wind Turbine Foundations

The degradation of onshore, reinforced-concrete wind turbine foundations is usually assessed via above-ground inspections, or through lengthy excavation campaigns that suspend wind power generation. Foundation cracks can and do occur below ground level, and while sustained measurements of crack behaviour could be used to quantify the risk of water ingress and reinforcement corrosion, these crac...

Investigation of waviness in wind turbine blades: Structural health monitoring

Waviness in composite wind turbine blades was detected and characterized with the help of air coupled ultrasonics. Based on the aspect ratio, the detected marcels are either accepted or rejected. A passive structural health monitoring approach has been presented here to monitor the accepted marcels above a threshold. The fatigue life of specimen is most affected in the presence of a marcel. Hen...

Wireless Concrete Strength Monitoring of Wind Turbine Foundations

Wind turbine foundations are typically cast in place, leaving the concrete to mature under environmental conditions that vary in time and space. As a result, there is uncertainty around the concrete's initial performance, and this can encourage both costly over-design and inaccurate prognoses of structural health. Here, we demonstrate the field application of a dense, wireless thermocouple netw...

Damage tolerance and structural monitoring for wind turbine blades.

The paper proposes a methodology for reliable design and maintenance of wind turbine rotor blades using a condition monitoring approach and a damage tolerance index coupling the material and structure. By improving the understanding of material properties that control damage propagation it will be possible to combine damage tolerant structural design, monitoring systems, inspection techniques a...