An experimental study on the identification of the root bolts state of
wind turbine blades using blade sensors
Abstract
Bolt looseness may occur on wind turbine (WT)blades exposed to
operational and environmental variability conditions, which sometimes
can cause catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it is necessary to
monitor the loosening state of WT blade root bolts. In order to solve
this problem, this paper proposes a method to monitor the looseness of
blade root bolts using the sensors installed on the WT blade. An
experimental platform was first built by installing various blade
sensors for monitoring bolt looseness. Through the physical experiment
of blade root bolts looseness, the response data of blade sensors were
then obtained under different bolt looseness degrees. Afterwards, by
analyzing the sensitivity of the response signal to the looseness of
blade root bolts, the types and number of sensors that can judge the
looseness of blade root bolts were determined. Finally, the multi-domain
sensitive features of response signals were fused to construct a hybrid
domain feature set of bolt looseness. The LightGBM classification
algorithm was applied to identify different bolt loosening states for
this hybrid domain feature data. The identification results of
experimental data showed that the proposed method can accurately
determine the loosening state of single or multiple WT blade root bolts.