Virtual Sensors Extend Structural Health Monitoring Across the Entire Wind Farm
Asset integrity management encompasses comprehensive approaches to ensuring the structural integrity, reliability and longevity of offshore wind turbines and foundations. This framework integrates monitoring, inspection, maintenance and risk management strategies. In the bottom-fixed wind sector, current best practices typically involve deploying structural health monitoring (SHM) systems on only a fraction of turbines within a farm (typically 10%), while the others receive minimal or no instrumentation. SHM systems use sensors such as strain gauges and accelerometers, with data analysed either continuously or periodically to evaluate the condition of structural components. However, this approach faces two key challenges: 1) the substantial initial and operational costs of implementing and maintaining SHM systems and 2) the limited sensor coverage, both in terms of the number of turbines monitored across a farm and the number of measurement points per turbine.
By Ambroise Cadoret, Fabien Caleyron and Vincent Le Corre, GreenWITS, France
