UWB Wind Turbine Blade Deflection Sensing for Wind Energy Cost Reduction

Sensors

Shuai Zhang¹  Tobias Lindstrøm Jensen²  Ondrej Franek¹  Patrick C. F. Eggers¹  Kim Olesen¹  Claus Byskov³  Gert Frølund Pedersen¹ 

[1] Antennas, Propagation and Radio Networking section at the Department of Electronic Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg 9100, Denmark; E-Mails:;Signal and Information Processing section at the Department of Electronic Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg 9100, Denmark; E-Mail:;LM Wind Power, Jupitervej 6, Kolding DK-6000, Denmark; E-Mail:

关键词: UWB;    radio link;    wind turbine;    blade deflection;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150819768

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

A new application of utilizing ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to sense wind turbine blade deflections is introduced in this paper for wind energy cost reduction. The lower UWB band of 3.1–5.3 GHz is applied. On each blade, there will be one UWB blade deflection sensing system, which consists of two UWB antennas at the blade root and one UWB antenna at the blade tip. The detailed topology and challenges of this deflection sensing system are addressed. Due to the complexity of the problem, this paper will first realize the on-blade UWB radio link in the simplest case, where the tip antenna is situated outside (and on the surface of) a blade tip. To investigate this case, full-blade time-domain measurements are designed and conducted under different deflections. The detailed measurement setups and results are provided. If the root and tip antenna locations are properly selected, the first pulse is always of sufficient quality for accurate estimations under different deflections. The measured results reveal that the blade tip-root distance and blade deflection can be accurately estimated in the complicated and lossy wireless channels around a wind turbine blade. Some future research topics on this application are listed finally.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.