Structural Damage Monitoring of Composite Blade under Fatigue Loading with Embedded Piezoelectric Transducers

Revolving wind turbine blades are the most critical component of the wind turbine system. Structural health monitoring system is one of the most useful techniques to detect the damage before the blade fails catastrophically which could destroy the entire wind turbine. Piezoelectric transducers can sense the production and propagation of the damage effectively. Different from the previous work, the piezoelectric transducers are embedded inside of the composite blade during the manufacturing procedure in this work. This paper describes the manufacturing procedure and the experimental process and results on a 2 meters long glass fibre reinforced plastic composite wind turbine blade under the fatigue loading.