A virtual sensing approach to operational modal analysis for wind turbine blades

Abstract

Wind turbine infrastructure represents an active area of research in the structural dynamics domain, which comes with significant challenges due to the nature of loading these systems are exposed to. The establishment of a Digital Twin for each blade, i.e. a digital model featuring encoded information on the structure "as-is", can introduce useful simplifications to data acquisition procedures. In order to provide a proper representation of the physical structure, the monitored full field response of each Digital Twin should match the one experienced by the actual blade in operational conditions. Performing output-only measurements on each single blade, only allows to acquire response at a finite number of locations on the structure. Virtual Sensing techniques can be applied to reconstruct the operational response of a system at unmeasured locations, contributing to build a true-to-life Digital Twin of the wind turbine blade. This work will focus on exploiting Virtual Sensing techniques for enriching the information obtained from simulated test data.