Health Monitoring and Safety Evaluation of the Offshore Wind Turbine Structure: A Review and Discussion of Future Development

Abstract

With the depletion of fossil energy, offshore wind power has become an irreplaceable energy source for most countries in the world. In recent years, offshore wind power generation has presented the gradual development trend of larger capacity, taller towers, and longer blades. The more flexible towers and blades have led to the structural operational safety of the offshore wind turbine (OWT) receiving increasing worldwide attention. From this perspective, health monitoring systems and operational safety evaluation techniques of the offshore wind turbine structure, including the monitoring system category, data acquisition and transmission, feature information extraction and identification, safety evaluation and reliability analysis, and the intelligent operation and maintenance, were systematically investigated and summarized in this paper. Furthermore, a review of the current status, advantages, disadvantages, and the future development trend of existing systems and techniques was also carried out. Particularly, the offshore wind power industry will continue to develop into deep ocean areas in the next 30 years in China. Practical and reliable health monitoring systems and safety evaluation techniques are increasingly critical for offshore wind farms. Simultaneously, they have great significance for strengthening operation management, making efficient decisions, and reducing failure risks, and are also the key link in ensuring safe energy compositions and achieving energy development targets in China. The aims of this article are to inform more scholars and experts about the status of the health monitoring and safety evaluation of the offshore wind turbine structure, and to contribute toward improving the efficiency of the corresponding systems and techniques.

Future prospects research on offshore wind power scale in China based on signal decomposition and extreme learning machine optimized by principal component analysis

“…In recent years, many scholars have devoted themselves to studying the status of offshore wind energy resources in various countries, and conducted evaluation from multiple layers. The hottest research is the construction technology of wind power 3‐20 such as tower structure, unit aerodynamic performance, wind turbine blade optimization design. Ma et al 3 established the time domain coupling calculation model of floating wind turbine, and proposed the wind turbine blade combination optimization design method.…”

Vibration‐Based Damage Assessment in Gravity‐Based Wind Turbine Tower under Various Waves

“…On the contrary, the vibration monitoring method has not been studied for various damage types. A few studies dealt with the monitoring of the tower part [24][25][26]. erefore, the noisy condition was not considered to focus on the effect of three damage types on modal parameters.…”

An Overview on Fault Diagnosis, Prognosis and Resilient Control for Wind Turbine Systems

“…Resilient control is a technique to minimize the effects from the faulty components or unexpected disruptions so that the wind turbine system can work with tolerant performance degradation under some abnormal conditions. During the past two decades, essential studies were carried out in the area of monitoring, fault diagnosis, prognosis, and resilient control for wind energy systems, which were well documented in the survey papers [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Table 1 presents some existing survey papers categorized by years and topics.…”

“…Off-shore wind turbines have received much more attention in wind turbine industries recently, owing to high capability for power generations. In [12], health monitoring and safety evaluation for off-shore wind turbines were surveyed with a focus on blades, tower, and foundation in off-shore wind turbine systems. In [13], wind turbine main bearings were reviewed from the angles of design, operation, modeling, damage mechanism, and corresponding fault diagnosis methods.…”