Wireless Concrete Strength Monitoring of Wind Turbine Foundations

Wireless Concrete Strength Monitoring of Wind Turbine Foundations

Wind turbine foundations are typically cast in place, leaving the concrete to mature under environmental conditions that vary in time and space. As a result, there is uncertainty around the concrete's initial performance, and this can encourage both costly over-design and inaccurate prognoses of structural health. Here, we demonstrate the field application of a dense, wireless thermocouple netw...

Structural integrity monitoring of onshore wind turbine concrete foundations

Crack Monitoring of Operational Wind Turbine Foundations

The degradation of onshore, reinforced-concrete wind turbine foundations is usually assessed via above-ground inspections, or through lengthy excavation campaigns that suspend wind power generation. Foundation cracks can and do occur below ground level, and while sustained measurements of crack behaviour could be used to quantify the risk of water ingress and reinforcement corrosion, these crac...

Prestressed Concrete Wind Turbine Supporting System

Metal-packaged fibre Bragg grating strain sensors for surface- mounting onto spalled concrete wind turbine foundations

In this work, we demonstrate preliminary results for a hermetically sealed, metal-packaged fibre Bragg grating strain sensor for monitoring existing concrete wind turbine foundations. As the sensor is bolted to the sub-surface of the concrete, it is suitable for mounting onto uneven, wet and degraded surfaces, which may be found in buried foundations. The sensor was able to provide reliable mea...