Development of temperature-robust damage factor based on sensor fusion for a wind turbine structure

Abstract

Wind power systems have gained much attention due to the relatively high reliability, maturity in technology and cost competitiveness compared to other renewable alternatives. Advances have been made to increase the power efficiency of the wind turbines while less attention has been focused on structural integrity assessment of the structural systems. Vibration-based damage detection has widely been researched to identify damages on a structure based on change in dynamic characteristics. Widely spread methods are natural frequency-based, mode shape-based, and curvature mode shape-based methods. The natural frequency-based methods are convenient but vulnerable to environmental temperature variation which degrades damage detection capability; mode shapes are less influenced by temperature variation and able to locate damage but requires extensive sensor instrumentation which is costly and vulnerable to signal noises. This study proposes novelty of damage factor based on sensor fusion to exclude effect of temperature variation. The combined use of an accelerometer and an inclinometer was considered and damage factor was defined as a change in relationship between those two measurements. The advantages of the proposed method are: 1) requirement of small number of sensor, 2) robustness to change in temperature and signal noise and 3) ability to roughly locate damage. Validation of the proposed method is carried out through numerical simulation on a simplified 5 MW wind turbine model.