1. Experimental Study of Thin Film Sensor Networks for Wind Turbine Blade Damage Detection.
- Author
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Downey, A., Laflamme, S., Ubertini, F., Sauder, H., and Sarkar, P.
- Subjects
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THIN film sensors , *WIND turbine blades , *STRAIN gages , *ELASTOMERS , *CAPACITORS , *SENSOR networks , *FAULT tolerance (Engineering) - Abstract
Damage detection of wind turbine blades is difficult due to their complex geometry and large size, for which large deployment of sensing systems is typically not economical. A solution is to develop and deploy dedicated sensor networks fabricated from inexpensive materials and electronics. The authors have recently developed a novel skin-type strain gauge for measuring strain over very large surfaces. The skin, a type of large-area electronics, is constituted from a network of soft elastomeric capacitors. The sensing system is analogous to a biological skin, where local strain can be monitored over a global area. In this paper, we propose the utilization of a dense network of soft elastomeric capacitors to detect, localize, and quantify damage on wind turbine blades. We also leverage mature off-the-shelf technologies, in particular resistive strain gauges, to augment such dense sensor network with high accuracy data at key locations, therefore constituting a hybrid dense sensor network. The proposed hybrid dense sensor network is installed inside a wind turbine blade model, and tested in a wind tunnel to simulate an operational environment. Results demonstrate the ability of the hybrid dense sensor network to detect, localize, and quantify damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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