Since September 2011, an exciting EUDP project has been underway to develop a practical way to detect, localize and predict damage to wind turbine blades. The associated cost of maintaining and repairing blades is a very real issue for wind farm operators and so far no remote inspection method has offered a viable solution. Thanks to the project, the best answer could lie in sophisticated algorithms using vibration measurements with considerable potential above and beyond the wind industry.
Reducing the costs associated with wind energy is essential to becoming competitive and attracting investors. The industry is faced with various challenges in this regard, especially as the turbines (and their blades) become bigger. Wind farms are placed offshore, new materials and designs are introduced, transportation issues arise due to sheer size, and manufacturing defects occur – to mention just some of the challenges.
As the use of wind turbines has become more widespread, so has our understanding of the stresses and strains they endure over prolonged exposure to nature. A wind turbine is made up of thousands of components integrated into a finely balanced piece of engineering; any defect can result in a significant drop in performance, leading to costly structural failures, safety issues and system downtime. Even though some parts of a wind turbine are monitored, such as the gearbox and main bearing, there is currently no viable means to check the integrity of the blades beyond expensive manual inspections, typically once a year. OEMs and major industry operators such as DONG Energy, EON and Vattenfall are researching this, but so far any ideas to automate the process have met with limited success. For this reason, the EUDP initiated a major project with Vattenfall, DTU Wind Energy and DTU Compute, Bladena, Total Wind, and Brüel & Kjær to find a solution.