Robotic deployment of stabilized shearography unit for wind turbine blade inspection

Vitor Marques rosas fernandes, Tariq Sattar

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

A wind turbine blade inspection system called Winspector has been developed by a European consortium to automate the in-situ non-destructive testing of wind blades. A robot platform is winched up a wind turbine tower to reach a blade locked into a 90-degree pitch angle. The blade region to be inspected is reached by a combination of an extension ladder and a 5-axis robot arm to place an end-effector onto the blade surface. The end-effector is critical to the success of the shearography technique used to detect subsurface defects when the blade is experiencing inevitable out-of-plane, in-plane, and root-to-tip vi-brations. The paper describes the development of the end-effector which carries the shearography unit and ensures (with passive compliance and design based on analysis of aerodynamic blade shapes) that the unit remains at a constant distance from blade surface in the presence of blade vibrations. The system has been tested with three separate field trials in a wind farm near Athens in Greece. Sub-surface defect detection with shearography has been successfully demon-strated.
Original languageEnglish
Pages367-379
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Aug 2022
Externally publishedYes
EventCLAWAR 2022: Robotics in Natural Settings -
Duration: 25 Aug 2022 → …

Conference

ConferenceCLAWAR 2022: Robotics in Natural Settings
Period25/08/22 → …

Keywords

  • Robotic in-situ inspection of wind blades
  • Shearography NDT of wind blades
  • Measurement of wind blade vibrations

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