Lidar-Based Spatial Large Deflection Measurement System for Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract

With the advancement of China’s wind power industry, research into full-scale structural testing of wind turbine blades, including static testing and fatigue testing, has shown increasing significance. Static testing measures the deflection at fixed points, using pull-wire sensors in industrial practice. However, the demerits of this method involve single dimension, excessive deviation, costly experiment, and complex installment. Given the advantages that lidar provides, correspondingly, high data density, precision, and convenience, we proposed a simple and efficient spatial large deflection measurement system for wind turbine blades with multi lidars. For point clouds collected from lidar scanners, registration based on point primitives and geometric primitives, dynamic radius DBSCAN clustering, spatial line clustering, and line integrals are applied to calculate the 3D coordinates of measured points on the blade. Experimentally validated, the proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness in serving as a viable alternative to the traditional pull-wire sensor measurement approach. In the minimum oscillation direction test, the measurement error is controlled within 3% compared to the theoretical value. Simultaneously, in the maximum swing direction test, the 3D coordinates of the measured point remain consistent with the changing trend observed under small deformation. These results confirm the feasibility of the system and its potentials to be generalized.