STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY EVALUATION OF WIND TURBINE BLADES USING PATTERN RECOGNITION ANALYSIS ON ACOUSTIC EMISSION DATA

Abstract

Current Wind Turbine (W/T) Blade certification practices require the conduction of static and fatigue tests on new blades, in order to assess whether the blade can sustain the applied loads. Within the scopes of a current EC-funded research project, Acoustic Emission (AE) monitoring has been extensively applied during testing of various W/T Blades of similar design. All blades were loaded