An acousto-ultrasonics pattern recognition approach for damage detection in wind turbine structures

The design of a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems is a requirement in the task of improving the safety and maintainability of the structures. Among the multiple techniques available for health monitoring, acousto-ultrasonics (AU) offers the possibility of inspecting large areas of structures from a piezoelectric active sensor network with a relatively small number of sensors. This paper proposes the use of an active piezoelectric sensor network which uses PZTs transducers working as sensors or actuators in different actuation phases to inspect a wind turbine structure to determine the presence of damages by analysing the data from the sensors with multivariate statistical methods such as PCA and damages indices in order to discern damages from the healthy structure.