Identification of Damage in a Wind Turbine Blade Using Mechanical Measurements and Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Due to the stochastic nature of environmental loadings, a lot of interest is paid in the discovery of possible damages to the involved
equipment in modern industry. In wind turbines’ blades, the development of a smart structural health monitoring system is essential. In this paper, a large-scale composite wind turbine blade model is designed and used for the detection of several damage scenarios. The process is mainly based on the development of monitoring techniques that exploit the capabilities of artificial neural networks. These techniques can provide the exact position of possible damages, under given external loading scenarios. Moreover, the use -of such methods decreases significantly the need for external intervention and at the same time it increases the accuracy of the whole approach. The above processes are simulated using the finite element method. The goal is to develop a neural network that realizes the correlation of measurements with damage patterns. The goal is focused on the solution of inverse problems involving elastically deformable structures, based on remote mechanical measurements. The correlation between measurements and damages, which is much more complicated in comparison to image analysis, is studied by means of neural networks.

Received: 29 November 2023 | Revised: 25 March 2024 | Accepted: 22 April 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy concerns. However, anonymous data are available on reasonable request. Requests should be made to the corresponding author Georgios E. Stavroulakis and should include a brief description of the intended use of the data.