Remote Structural Health Monitoring for Industrial Wind Turbines Using Short-Range Doppler Radar

Utilizing a radar sensor to monitor the horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) has been reported in the literature. However, the specific methods for monitoring its structural health have not been well studied. In this article, an overall structural health monitoring solution of HAWT using the Doppler radar sensor has been proposed, which includes parameter extraction and fault detection. Based on the time-Doppler features of the HAWT, the operational parameters, including rotational speed, downtime, and yaw time, can be accurately extracted from the spectrogram. Three kinds of faults, including blade rupture, blade surface damage, and angle mismatch, can be detected. The simulated results demonstrate that the proposed solution can effectively extract the parameters and detect the specific faults of the HAWT. Moreover, the proposed solution is also validated with real onshore wind turbines. Both results reveal the prospect of using the radar sensor for noncontact structural health monitoring of HAWT.