A wind turbine blade inspection system called Winspector has been developed by a European consortium to automate the in-situ non-destructive testing of wind blades. A robot platform is winched up a wind turbine tower to reach a blade locked into a 90° pitch angle. The blade region to be inspected is reached by a combination of an extension ladder and a 5-axis robot arm to place an end-effector onto the blade surface. The end-effector is critical to the success of the shearography technique used to detect subsurface defects when the blade is experiencing inevitable out-of-plane, in-plane, and root-to-tip vibrations. The paper describes the development of the end-effector which carries the shearography unit and ensures (with passive compliance and design based on analysis of aerodynamic blade shapes) that the unit remains at a constant distance from blade surface in the presence of blade vibrations. The system has been tested with three separate field trials in a wind farm near Athens in Greece. Sub-surface defect detection with shearography has been successfully demonstrated.


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    Title :

    Robotic Deployment of Stabilized Shearography Unit for Wind Turbine Blade Inspection


    Additional title:

    Lect. Notes in Networks, Syst.



    Conference:

    Climbing and Walking Robots Conference ; 2022 ; Ponta Delgada, Portugal September 12, 2022 - September 14, 2022



    Publication date :

    2022-08-25


    Size :

    13 pages





    Type of media :

    Article/Chapter (Book)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





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