Investigation of wind turbine blade ultrasonic pulse-echo signal decomposition based on the matching pursuit algorithm

Abstract

The ultrasonic testing method is commonly used to detect the internal defects of wind turbine blades, but difficulty is found in judging the echo position due to the waveform superposition caused by the thin web. In this paper, an improved matching tracking algorithm is proposed to decompose the ultrasonic detection echo of wind turbine blades. This method extracts the time-delay parameter of the echo to estimate the time-of-flight (TOF), which provides the necessary information for further judgement of hidden defects in the wind turbine blades. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via simulation experiments and real tests.