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TWI Tests New Wind Turbine Blade Monitoring System

Thu, 14 November, 2019

TWI began full-scale testing on a 26m wind turbine blade using a new system that combines a fibre-optic structural health monitoring system with blade management software, providing a comprehensive solution for wind turbine blade monitoring, repair and management.

Jialin Tang and Natalia Garban, Project Leaders in TWI’s Condition and Structural Monitoring (CSM) section, met with the BladeSave project partners at Blaest, a blade test centre in Denmark, to install fibre-optic acoustic emission (AE) sensors that will continuously monitor the structural integrity of the wind turbine blade.

This work is being carried out as part of a consortium project, BladeSave, towards creating a system that can increase the average annual availability per wind turbine from 95% to 98-99%, through the optimisation of maintenance routine inspections and the maximisation of component lifetime versus unscheduled repair/replacement and breakdown.

The fibre-optic structural health monitoring system provides multi-sensing capability (strains, vibrations and acoustic emission) and the blade management software links routine inspection data to the structural health monitoring system’s data.

The full-scale test will last one week and aims to monitor the blade from installation to failure. BladeSave is co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union under grant agreement 760353.

BladeSave project partners implementing the full-scale testing at Blaest, Denmark
BladeSave project partners implementing the full-scale testing at Blaest, Denmark

For more information please email:


contactus@twi.co.uk