Analysis and Detection of Erosion in Wind Turbine Blades

This paper studies erosion at the tip of wind turbine blades by considering aerodynamic analysis, modal analysis and predictive machine learning modeling. Erosion can be caused by several factors and can affect different parts of the blade, reducing its dynamic performance and useful life. The ability to detect and quantify erosion on a blade is an important predictive maintenance task for wind turbines that can have broad repercussions in terms of avoiding serious damage, improving power efficiency and reducing downtimes. This study considers both sides of the leading edge of the blade (top and bottom), evaluating the mechanical imbalance caused by the material loss that induces variations of the power coefficient resulting in a loss in efficiency. The QBlade software is used in our analysis and load calculations are preformed by using blade element momentum theory. Numerical results show the performance of a blade based on the relationship between mechanical damage and aerodynamic behavior, which are then validated on a physical model. Moreover, two machine learning (ML) problems are posed to automatically detect the location of erosion (top of the edge, bottom or both) and to determine erosion levels (from 8% to 18%) present in the blade. The first problem is solved using classification models, while the second is solved using ML regression, achieving accurate results. ML pipelines are automatically designed by using an AutoML system with little human intervention, achieving highly accurate results. This work makes several contributions by developing ML models to both detect the presence and location of erosion on a blade, estimating its level and applying AutoML for the first time in this domain.