Zhaohui Zhang

In cold regions, the power generation efficiency of wind turbines is affected by blade icing. Heavy icing on blades will change the aerodynamic configuration of the blades and can even cause blades to crack or break. Therefore, monitoring and deicing technologies are important for the safe operation of wind turbines. This study proposes a novel strain ratio index based on mechanical analysis of icing, which causes the neutral axis shift and different strain ratio change between waving and shimmy directions. Data from the 5 kW wind turbine blade model in a low-temperature laboratory and the 1.5 MW full-scale field wind turbine monitoring over 1 year are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed strain ratio index and icing detection criteria are derived from mechanical analysis with clear interpretability while reducing ambiguity from structural damage. The relationship between the strain ratio index and ice thickness is quantified through laboratory tests and validated by field applications, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness under complex real-world service scenarios.

Offshore wind power is becoming attractive in the wind-power field. With the rapid development of wind-power technology, high-power wind turbines have been implemented in practice. However, the increase in the length of the wind turbine blade causes the pile foundation to withstand a prone overturning moment. For overcoming the problems of traditional sensing technology and meeting the monitoring requirements of pile foundations, a 20 cm spatial resolution differential pulse pair Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (DPP-BOTDA) technique is used to measure a 69 m long offshore wind turbine pile under horizontal loading. From the distributed strain data collected in the test, the maximum stress location of the long pile under the horizontal load can be obtained. By analyzing the load and maximum strain (F-ε_max) curve, the horizontal bearing capacity of the pile foundation can exceed 900 kN, which is the maximum horizontal load of the design. The distributed displacement calculation method based on distributed strain data is proposed, according to the force characteristics of steel pipe piles. By comparing the calculated displacement data with the measured data by the dial indicators, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) value is only 0.03548. Results show that the 20 cm spatial resolution DPP-BOTDA technology is very suitable for the bearing capacity test of offshore wind turbine steel pipe pile foundations.