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° 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 vibrations. 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 demonstrated.
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Acknowledgements
The Winspector project was funded by the European H2020 FTI program, 1/09/2015, Reference: 700986, with lead partner WRS Marine (Netherlands), and partners IKnowHow (formerly Innora) (Greece), TWI Ltd (UK), London South Bank University (UK), Simens Gamesa (Spain).
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Marques, V., Sattar, T.P. (2023). Robotic Deployment of Stabilized Shearography Unit for Wind Turbine Blade Inspection. In: Cascalho, J.M., Tokhi, M.O., Silva, M.F., Mendes, A., Goher, K., Funk, M. (eds) Robotics in Natural Settings. CLAWAR 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 530. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15226-9_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15226-9_35
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