Towards Life-cycle Management of Wind Turbines Based on Structural Health Monitoring

The integration of structural health monitoring (SHM) into life-cycle management (LCM) strategies can enable wind turbine manufacturers, owners, and operators to precisely schedule maintenance work at minimum associated life-cycle costs. Monitoring data, i.e. structural, environmental, and operational data continuously collected by SHM systems, can effectively be used to capture the structural behavior of wind turbines and to reduce (epistemic) uncertainty. Both the resistance parameters of the structure and the load effects acting on the components can continuously be updated facilitating an accurate life-cycle management. This paper presents an integrated approach towards life-cycle management of wind turbines based on structural health monitoring. Information gained from a SHM system installed on a wind turbine in Germany is coupled with an online LCM system for optimum decision making with respect to operation and maintenance. The integrated LCM system presented in this paper consists of different software modules, which are installed on computers located in the wind turbine and at other, spatially distributed locations. This paper first describes the SHM system, and then presents preliminary results obtained from the online LCM system. Two case studies investigating the structural performance and the operational efficiency of the wind turbine are reported.