title: Aspects of structural health and condition monitoring of offshore wind turbines.
abstract: Wind power has expanded significantly over the past years, although reliability of wind turbine systems, especially of offshore wind turbines, has been many times unsatisfactory in the past. Wind turbine failures are equivalent to crucial financial losses. Therefore, creating and applying strategies that improve the reliability of their components is important for a successful implementation of such systems. Structural health monitoring (SHM) addresses these problems through the monitoring of parameters indicative of the state of the structure examined. Condition monitoring (CM), on the other hand, can be seen as a specialized area of the SHM community that aims at damage detection of, particularly, rotating machinery. The paper is divided into two parts: in the first part, advanced signal processing and machine learning methods are discussed for SHM and CM on wind turbine gearbox and blade damage detection examples. In the second part, an initial exploration of supervisor control and data acquisition systems data of an offshore wind farm is presented, and data-driven approaches are proposed for detecting abnormal behaviour of wind turbines. It is shown that the advanced signal processing methods discussed are effective and that it is important to adopt these SHM strategies in the wind energy sector.
authors.affiliation: Dynamics Research Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Mappin St., Sheffield S1 3JD, UK i.antoniadou@sheffield.ac.uk.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Antoniadou
authors.affiliation: Dynamics Research Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Mappin St., Sheffield S1 3JD, UK.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Dervilis
authors.affiliation: Dynamics Research Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Mappin St., Sheffield S1 3JD, UK.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Papatheou
authors.affiliation: Vattenfall Research and Development, New Renewables, The Tun Building, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AE, UK.
authors.forename: A E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Maguire
authors.affiliation: Dynamics Research Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Mappin St., Sheffield S1 3JD, UK.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Worden
keywords: condition monitoring; data analysis; offshore wind turbines; structural health monitoring