Radar-based technology aims for improved wind farm operations

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Radar-based scanner developed in Germany finds defects in the material composition of wind turbine blades at depth and with greater accuracy

Engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF have developed a radar-based scanner that accurately detects defects in wind turbine blades.

Modern wind turbine blades are mainly constructed from glass fibre and carbon fibre reinforced plastics (GFRP / CFRP), so that they can elastically absorb the wind energy from strong gusts of wind. For a single blade, up to 100 sheets of glass fibre webbing are layered on top of each other, shaped and then glued together with epoxy resin.

“The difficulty lies in layering the glass fibre sheets flat before they are glued, without creating undulations and folds, and avoiding the formation of lumps of resin or sections of laminate which don’t set when applying the epoxy,” said Dr Axel Hülsmann, coordinator of the radar project and group manager of sensor systems at the Fraunhofer IAF.

These kinds of defects, as well as delaminations or fractures, can be identified on a large-scale using infrared thermography.

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