Fiber Optic System
Generates optical pulses, transmits them through the fiber, receives the backscattered signals and converts them into electrical digital signals.
Project — Wind Turbine
Real-time fiber-optic acoustic monitoring for turbine blades
The project aims to develop a robust, reliable and real-time fiber-optic acoustic Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system that enables continuous online monitoring of offshore wind turbine blades.
Project summary
Continuous, online, and out on the water
Blades are the components hardest to reach and most expensive to inspect. An acoustic sensing system embedded in the structure reports on their condition without anyone having to get to them.
Project key components
Three subsystems, one signal chain
IoT System
Receives the digital signals through an IoT gateway and sends the data to the cloud for storage and analysis.
Engineering Model
Analyses the data in the cloud to detect and assess structural damage in the wind turbine blades.
System's architect
From optical pulse to damage assessment
Project objectives
Two challenges the system is built to solve
Replacing conventional SHM systems
Conventional monitoring depends on sensors that are difficult to install on and inside a turbine blade. The fiber-optic approach removes that installation barrier — a single fiber replaces a network of discrete sensors and wiring.
Quantifying and assessing damage
Knowing that something happened is not enough. Conventional systems lack the ability to quantify and assess damage; the engineering model turns the measured acoustic signals into an assessment of what the damage actually is.
Want the technical detail?
We are glad to go deeper on the interrogation scheme, the resolution we achieve and how the engineering model is trained and validated.