Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

This chapter provides a case example of frontier offshore wind asset integrity and structural health monitoring (SHM) via the development of an emergent sensing modality for quality assurance and detection of common manufacturing and operationally induced defects in offshore wind turbine (WT) blades. This chapter takes a tutorial approach to the detection of a delamination defect in a decommissioned WT blade section and water ingress into the delamination defect. We provide a review of SHM methods currently employed in the offshore wind sector and perform a comparative analysis to inform the properties of optimal sensing methods. We provide a case example, where K-band, millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar was successfully applied to determine the presence of a common WT delamination feature and the subsequent ingress of water due to the offshore environment. The asset integrity target was a decommissioned wind turbine blade of mixed composite construction, with results that demonstrate the suitability of the FMCW sensing modality to asset integrity inspection and SHM techniques. There are several advantages to the applied FMCW system, including safety compliant electronics (ATEX and CE certified systems for safe operations offshore) and high applicability to both human-operated and semi-autonomous to fully autonomous robotic systems