Abstract
Large-scale offshore wind turbine blades need careful dimensional inspection at the production stage. This paper aims to establish an accurate measurement technique using Coherent Laser Radar technology combined with B-Spline point generation and alignment. Through varying the Degrees of Freedom (DoF), used for data point transformation, within the Spatial Analyser software package, erroneous inspection results generated by unconstrained blade flexing can be eradicated. The paper concludes that implementing a single B-Spline point generation and alignment method, whilst allowing transformation with DoF in X, Y and Rz, provides confidence to wind turbine blade manufacturers that inspection data is accurate. The experimental procedure described in this paper can also be applied to the precision inspection of other large-scale non-rigid, unconstrained objects. This paper aims to establish an accurate measurement technique using Laser Radar for wind turbine blade inspection.Degrees of Freedom are used for data point transformation.B-Spline curves are constructed to compare with the complex curved surface profiles of the CAD blade.Experimental procedures and data transformations are proposed for future industrial implementation.
Highlights
Large-scale offshore wind turbine blades have high geometric dimensional precision requirements which need to be inspected during the production stage to ensure designed geometrical tolerance specifications are satisfied
This experiment evaluated if changing the position of the root from 1 m to 50 m along the Z-axis within Spatial Analyser (SA) affects the alignment accuracy
Through comparing the 1 m root and 50 m root results, the maximum variation of the three analytical factors is 70.01 mm. This illustrates that the position of the root along the constrained Z-axis does not affect alignment performance or accuracy
Summary
Large-scale offshore wind turbine blades have high geometric dimensional precision requirements which need to be inspected during the production stage to ensure designed geometrical tolerance specifications are satisfied. In the inspection procedure, aligning the computer-aided design (CAD) blade model to the measured blade data is integral to the measurement accuracy of the inspection. Minimising the measurement error during inspection, through robust data alignment techniques, provides blade manufacturers with confidence in their manufacturing procedures, enabling the design and build of more complex and aerodynamically efficient blade profiles [1]. In the case of large-scale wind turbine blade inspection, improved metrology technologies [2,3,4,5] enable manufacturers to make well informed decisions that are critical in creating superior blade prototypes [6]
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