Experimental Study on Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Blades Based on Acoustics

Against the backdrop of growing demand for environmental protection and green energy in countries around the world, wind energy is considered to be the primary clean energy source getting rapid development, and the scale of wind power generation is increasing rapidly. Blades are the key components of wind turbines, and blade failures often lead to high maintenance costs. Therefore, it is of great significance to vigorously develop wind turbine blade condition monitoring technology to instantly understand and master the health status of the blades, to reduce the wind turbine operation and maintenance costs, and to improve the economic benefits and safety production level of wind farms. At present, there are many blade monitoring methods, but there are relatively few acoustic-based studies. This paper proposes an acoustic-based blade condition monitoring technology for wind turbines, by installing sound sensors inside the blade, collecting and processing the sound signals inside the blade, obtaining the difference of acoustic signals between the damage-free blade and the damaged blade, and thus determining whether the blade is damaged, and verifying the feasibility of the method through simulation and test. The results show that when the blade is cracked, its overall noise level will be higher than that of the undamaged blade.