Yaowen Ou

Research

Vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) has been extensively applied to modern wind turbines (WTs), in an effort to extend their designed lifetime range. Yet, most of the reported studies use conventional methods that do not consider the inevitable interaction of WTs with their strongly varying environmental and loading conditions.

The aim of Yaowen's research is to fill this gap by extending the current state-of-the-art in SHM of WTs to systematically account for their operational variability. To this end, diverse methods are adopted and advanced, ranging from adaptive functional ARX models to spatiotemporal Kalman filters (STKFs). The investigated methods are validated and assessed on data derived both via simulation, as well as experiments on a scaled blade tested within a climatic chamber. The results indicate the feasibility of adoption of monitoring tools for damage detection on blade components.