Modeling and Measurement Study for Wind Turbine Blade Trailing Edge Cracking Acoustical Detection

The rapid deployment of the offshore wind turbine technology has brought more requirements for remote turbine health monitoring especially for blade health conditions. The trailing edge cracking (TEC) is often the early stage blade health issue which leads to more serious problems and even crash of wind turbine. In response to this cracking issue, this paper presents aero-acoustic noise modeling analysis of the blade airfoil section with and without cracking of typical 3 millimeter (mm) gap in the trailing edge and a comparative study between the simulation and semi-empirical model for the calculation aero acoustic characteristics (AACs) of airfoil TEC noise, and description a new acoustical sensor detection technology of blade TEC. The IEEE P2400 standard will be utilized to complete the acoustical signal calculation for rotating sound source and compared with other existing measured acoustical signals from on-site microphone. Several simulations are presented to test and validate the proposed model and analysis methods, demonstrating this research work cannot only analyze the AACs of the blade TEC detection, but will also contribute the complete wind turbine blade health monitoring technologies.