Chapter 8 - Remotely operated vehicle applications

Abstract

The constant increasing of renewable energy demand is leading wind turbines to become very complex and sophisticated devices. These technological developments imply new methods and tools to ensure the reliability of the systems. For this purpose, non-destructive testing techniques are widely employed in the field of wind turbine maintenance. This work presents the implementation of a walking robot-based system that allows non-destructive testing to be carried out in difficult access areas of wind turbines. The paper is divided as: a brief literature overview is done to identify those limitations of current procedures that could be overcome by using the proposed tool; a detailed explanation of the novel system is given, where the different components and features of the robot are described; several applications of the proposed systems are also shown. These applications can be classified regarding to the type of sensor and the area to inspect: Acoustic emission, visual inspection, guided wave testing, noise analysis, or thermographic inspections are some of the non-destructive testing techniques that can be aided by this tool. Moreover, external and internal surfaces of blades, tower, nacelle, and other difficult access areas can be reached by the robot. Finally, some advantages of this system are enhanced with respect to the conventional methodologies. The usefulness of the proposed system is demonstrated in terms of safety and efficiency with respect to other procedures.