Rotor blades of wind turbines are exposed to very different static and dynamic loads over the entire period of use.

This includes the (worldwide) transport of a rotor blade from the production site to the construction site of the wind turbine as well as the many years of operation under the toughest operating and environmental conditions.

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The complex design, the challenges to production quality and the uncertainties in transport and operation under individual site conditions lead to high safety margins in the design and thus to increased material and production costs. Nevertheless, defects, damage and accidents occur unexpectedly on rotor blades, the cause of which often cannot be determined.

The determination of the respective cause of damage - design weakness, quality defects, faults during construction or overloading due to extreme weather or similar - is in the interest of the operator or insurer of the wind turbine, but is also valuable for all other participants in the value chain. In order to identify safety risks at an early stage, preventive observations and recordings of high loads in continuous operation, which lead to damage accumulation, are therefore also of great value.

 

The aim of the research project is to research and develop a system for transport monitoring and accident analysis as well as for monitoring the loads on the rotor blade throughout the entire wind turbine operation. This also includes all hardware components and software algorithms as well as their integration into a rotor blade including realistic testing of laboratory samples of the load box.