Damage assessment in wind turbine technology

The economic efficiency of wind turbines WT is strictly dependent on their availability and reliability. This problem is most important in the case of offshore wind turbines OWT. There is a search for new materials, new manufacturing process, and new rules of structural designs. The aim of it, is to achieve far tighter safety margins than previously developed wind turbine solutions. Attention of many researchers is focused on the problem of WT/OWT reliability. In this paper Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) approach for wind turbines is presented. This approach is based on such topics as piezoelectric transducers, elastic waves propagation phenomenon, fibre Bragg gratings sensors, structural vibrations analysis. The combination of mentioned techniques allows to perform efficient both local and global SHM of the OWT. Research results presented in this paper are mainly related to fibre reinforced polymer materials FRPs due to fact that they are widely utilized in wind turbine blades manufacturing. However, certain results for metallic structures (tower structure) were also presented. Considered above investigations are intended to develop future SHM techniques that include sensors, hardware, software and methodologies of WT/OWT structural assessment.