15 - Carbon fibre sensors embedded in glass fibre-based composites for windmill blades

Abstract

As fibre-reinforced composite structures, eg, wind mill blades, are susceptible to repeated complex loading or straining in service, damage-sensing or structural health monitoring (SHM) is utterly important for the purpose of hazard mitigation and usage maximization. Most of the conventional SHM systems, eg, using fibre Bragg grating, strain gauges, acoustic emission analysis and piezoelectric sensors, are generally costly, time consuming or not optimized for the use in complex wind mill blades. Compared to the aforementioned SHM systems, textile technically integrated piezoresistive carbon filament yarn (CFY) sensors in composite structures offer good potential for the following reasons: time and cost-effective one-step integration in the textile reinforcements of the composite using textile technical fabrication processes, capability of in situ sensing directly in inaccessible areas of the load-bearing reinforcement layers, global as well as local online SHM of large components, no interference with the excellent mechanical properties of FRCs and high-gauge protection against environmental influencing factors.