The Danish-German joint research project ReliaBlade aims at developing and demonstrating techniques to create a unique Digital Twin for each individual wind turbine blade with its specific defects and imperfections. Thereby, the digitalization of the entire process is key, which also becomes obvious in the use of high-precision scanning, Non Destructive Testing (NDT) tools, advanced image processing techniques and multi-scale modeling of blades. The Digital Twin tracks not only the current state – it can also be used to predict the future state of the rotor blade as damages initiate and grow through its entire life cycle.
Kim Branner, Senior Researcher DTU Wind Energy says: “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.”
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.
Willi Wroblewski, Research Associate, Fraunhofer IWES adds: “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.“