Testing, inspecting and monitoring technologies for wind turbine blades: A survey

Renewable wind energy is one of the most efficient and effective ways to deal with global warming and energy crisis. Recently, wind energy has grown at an impressive rate in entire world. As we know, the blades are the most important components of wind turbine. In order to increase the energy conversion efficiency, the size of wind turbine blades becomes more and more big which blade diameter ranges from about 20m to about 100m or even. However, wind turbine blades are facing increasingly harsh and complexity service environment. It is necessary to testing, inspecting and monitoring of wind turbine blades in order to guarantee the service safety of wind turbine blades. This paper surveys the testing, inspecting and monitoring technologies for wind turbine blades, including mechanical property testing, non-destructive testing/inspecting, full-scale testing, structural health monitoring and condition monitoring. And then, the development trends and some suggestions of testing, inspecting and monitoring technologies for wind turbine blades are discussed.