Fleet-wise structural health monitoring of (offshore) wind turbine foundations

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paper

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Over the past years offshore wind energy has known huge developments. With growing farm sizes, increasing wind turbine sizes and the challenging conditions offshore the demand for remote health monitoring has never been higher. While condition monitoring of the drive train for individual turbines has become common practice and structural health monitoring of the blades is emerging, the offshore foundation is still considered as a black box, with little knowledge available on the current condition. Unfortunately, Non Destructive Testing (NDT) on all offshore turbines is too expensive and these foundations are designed for minimum inspection, consequently little structural data is available. By contrast there is a lot of operational information available from each turbines SCADA system (e.g. power output, rpm, wind speed). In the next years OWI-lab is developing an approach to use the available SCADA data and a limited number of instrumented turbines (so called fleet leaders) to assess the structural integrity of the entire farm. In particular the progression of fatigue life is a major concern to the wind-farm owners, as fatigue is the main design driver for most offshore wind turbine foundations. As such the fleet leaders are equipped with an array of (optical) strain gauges and accelerometers. In this contribution we will show some initial results of the project with a particular focus on the measurements obtained from 5 fleet-leader offshore wind turbines already instrumented by OWI-lab. It will show how fatigue can be related to the offshore conditions and the operational history of a turbine. We will also elaborate on how this knowledge can be used to improve O&M and end-of-life decisions.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of EWSHM 2016
PublisherNDT.net
Number of pages8
Volume21
Edition8
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Event8th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring - Bilbao, Spain
Duration: 5 Jul 20168 Jul 2016
http://www.ewshm2016.com/

Publication series

NameE-JOURNAL OF NON-DESTRUCTIVE TESTING
ISSN (Electronic)1435-4934

Workshop

Workshop8th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring
Abbreviated titleEWSHM
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBilbao
Period5/07/168/07/16
Internet address

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