The growing demands for electrical energy, especially renewable, is boosting the development of wind turbines equipped with longer composite blades. To reduce the maintenance cost of such huge composite parts, the structural health monitoring (SHM) is an approach to anticipate and/or follow the structural behaviour along time. Apart from the development of traditional non-destructive testing methods, in order to reduce the use of intrusive instrumentation there is a growing interest for the development of “self-sensing materials”. An interesting route to achieve this, can be to introduce carbon nanofillers such as nanotubes (CNT) in the composite structures, which enables to create systems that are sensitive to both strain and damage. This review aims at updating the state of the art of this topic so far. A first overview of the existing SHM techniques for thermoset based wind turbine blades composites is presented. Then, the use of self-sensing materials for strain and damage sensing is presented. Different strategies are overviewed and discussed, from the design of conductive composites such as carbon fibres reinforced polymers, to the elaboration of conductive nano-reinforced polymer composites. The origins of sensing mechanisms along with the percolation theory applied to nanofillers dispersed in polymer matrices are also detailed.
The sustained development of wind energies requires a dramatic rising of turbine blade size especially for their off-shore implantation, which requires as well composite materials with higher performances. In this context, the monitoring of the health of these structures appears essential to decrease maintenance costs, and produce a cheaper kwh. Thus, the input of quantum resistive sensors (QRS) arrays, to monitor the strain gradient in area of interest and anticipate damage in the core of composite structures, without compromising their mechanical properties, sounds promising. QRS are nanostructured strain and damage sensors, transducing strain at the nanoscale into a macroscopic resistive signal for a consumption of only some µW. QRS can be positioned on the surface or in the core of the composite material between plies, and this homogeneously as they are made of the same resin as the composite. The embedded QRS had a gauge factor of 3, which was found more than enough to follow the strain from 0.01% to 1.4% at the final failure. The spatial deployment of four QRS in array made possible for the first time the experimental visualization of a strain field comparable to the numerical simulation. QRS proved also to be able to memorize damage accumulation within the sample and thus could be used to attest the mechanical history of composites.
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