Rainer Krankenhagen, Mathias Rollig and Taarna Studemund
Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Germany
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Fundam Renewable Energy Appl
The turbine rotor blades are one of the most stressed components of a wind turbine, and the trend to longer blades beyond 50 meters leads to increasing loads. The standard inspection procedure is visual and by coin-tap, it requires highly trained stuff special equipment and a stopped turbine. In order to reduce direct access to the particular blades, an inspection method working at longer distances is needed. In addition to the installation of Condition Monitoring Systems (CMS) camera inspection by means of photo cameras as well as infrared cameras could be a suited tool. Although the onsite thermo graphic inspection of rotor blades was presented in 2006 by Meinlschmidt and Aderhold, almost no further development or observation results were published so far. The talk presents some selected results from a research project concerning the thermo graphic rotor blade inspection. It is demonstrated that the observation can be performed at resting as well as at rotating blades. Pros and cons of the proposed reference method are discussed using some examples from onsite measurements.
Rainer Krankenhagen received a diploma degree in Solid state physics in 1990 and a Ph.D. from Humboldt-University Berlin in 1996. His thesis was dealing with material research for photovoltaics. Since 2008 he works as a senior scientist in the Federal Institute for Materials Research and –Testing (BAM) in the field of nondestructive testing. From 2011 until 2015 he was in charge for the research project IKARUS concerning thermographic inspection of wind turbine rotor blades from larger distances.
Email: rainer.krankenhagen@bam.de
