Optical Fiber Strain Sensing Of Wind Turbine Blades and Structures

Applications > Wind Energy

Wind Energy
The wind turbine industry is the fastest growing market area for the use of composite materials. Current state-of-the-art turbines are huge, providing multi-megawatt power output. To generate such power, turbine rotorblade diameters of over 100m and nacelle heights of over 120m are becoming standard. Huge turbines such as these, utilising the latest in composite material technology, stretch the designer's knowledge and the material's capability to the limit. Optical fiber Strain Sensing (OFSS) can help greatly by giving structural performance feedback to the design function, ratifying FEA models and allowing for the development of lighter blades with lower production cost and improved performance.

As turbines grow, and their deployment becomes more widespread and remote, it is becoming increasingly important that systems are put in place to monitor their condition in real time. Such monitoring offers significant cost of ownership savings through condition based maintenance, reduced downtime and a reduced likelihood of catastrophic failure. Condition monitoring of turbine gears is already commonplace, but price has to date been an obstacle stopping the adoption of similar monitoring of blades, towers and foundations. Smart Fibres' new low-cost interrogators break through this obstacle and offer for the first time a commercially sound cost/benefit ratio for turbine structural health monitoring.

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Potential additional advantage is available to the turbine operator through using loads data from blade sensors for real time pitch control. Particularly on larger turbines, such control theoretically offers increased turbine output and significantly reduced out-of balance loading on the tower and its foundations.

Our expertise of optical fiber sensing in the wind turbine market is second to none. Our OFSS systems have been actively used in rotorblade design and testing since 2001 and in the same year our OFSSS I unit made history by being the first of its kind to monitor blade loading in a working wind turbine.

The experience of the offshore engineering industry as to the cost benefits of structural monitoring provides a valuable lesson to the offshore wind energy industry. The main benefits of optical fiber sensing (zero drift, electro-magnetic immunity, fatigue durability, multiplexing capability) make it the ideal technology for long term condition monitoring and control of turbines.

See the Wind Turbine Blades Project for further information