Development of wireless laser blade deflection monitoring system for mobile wind turbine management host

This study proposes a wireless laser displacement sensor system for in situ deflection monitoring of wind turbine blades. This system consists of a tower-installed laser displacement sensor system composed of a laser displacement sensor head, controller, Zigbee transmitter, and analog-to-digital converter module, combined with a mobile host that includes a Zigbee receiver and a laptop. In contrast to the approach of blade sensor installation, the laser displacement sensor system is installed in the tower to enable noncontact blade displacement monitoring. The concepts of direct noncontact remote sensing and actuation from the tower and remote power delivery from the tower to blade-installed sensors and actuators will enable various approaches for wind turbine structural health monitoring. The proposed system can easily identify problems related to deflection. The size of wind blades increases with energy demands. Due to the large size of wind turbines, current wind turbines are installed very high above ground level. It is impractical to monitor the results from laser displacement sensor through wired connection in these cases. Hence, wired connections of laser displacement sensors to base monitoring stations must be replaced with a wireless solution. This wireless solution is achieved using Zigbee technology. The output from the laser displacement sensor is fed to a microcontroller, which acts as an analog-to-digital converter. The output from the microcontroller is connected to the Zigbee transceiver module, which transmits the data, and at the other end, the Zigbee reads the data and displays it on a PC, from which users can monitor the condition of the wind blades.