ReliaBlade

ReliaBlade develops and demonstrates techniques to create Digital Twins for wind turbine blades with their unique defects and imperfections. The digital twin can track not only the current state of the blade but also predict the future state - as damages initiate and grow through its entire life cycle.

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“The vision for the project is to develop methodologies for design, operation and maintenance of wind turbine rotor blades using a digital twin of every blade manufactured. We will then use this digital twin to follow the current state and predicting the future state of each blade during its entire life cycle using an automated condition monitoring approach.”

Kim Branner, Senior Researcher and Head of Section, DTU Wind Energy

Within the scope of ReliaBlade, techniques to update the Digital Twin based on different sensor and measurement methods are developed and demonstrated. These are tested on sub-components of the blade with specifically introduced defects and controlled loading, and are finally transferred to full-scale blades under realistic loading simulation and in consideration of the entire life cycle of rotor blades.

“One key aspect of the ReliaBlade project and the work on Digital Blade Twins is the good representation of the product life cycle in the projects and the excellent partners. As the blade design for the project is open we can work with advanced models to predict damages. The manufacturing of the test blades in a research environment allows to produce the blade with modern instrumentation and detailed process monitoring and feed the data back into the blade modelling to predict the damage behavior in the full-scale tests conducted with innovative test methods.“

Florian Sayer, Group Manager Fraunhofer IWES

Work Packages

Project structure

ReliaBlade consists of nine technical work packages as well as management and communication work packages. The technical work packages are described in brief terms in the following.