Engineering Commons^™

Investigation Of Waviness In Wind Turbine Blades: Structural Health Monitoring, Sunil Kishore Chakrapani, Vinay Dayal, Daniel J. Barnard

Sunil Kishore Chakrapani

Waviness in composite wind turbine blades was detected and characterized with the help of air coupled ultrasonics. Based on the aspect ratio, the detected marcels are either accepted or rejected. A passive structural health monitoring approach has been presented here to monitor the accepted marcels above a threshold. The fatigue life of specimen is most affected in the presence of a marcel. Hence this study focused on the damage evaluation after fatigue testing. Wavy laminate was subjected to fatigue load to investigate the fracture mechanisms near the marcel. Different types of defects were identified from this study and were used …