Fri, 20 November, 2020
The SheaRIOS project, of which TWI is a part, has advanced with the successful implementation of system integration and ground trials in readiness for inspection of an operational wind turbine.
Working at the iKnowHow laboratory in Athens, the SheaRIOS consortium has successfully completed the system integration activity, bringing together the main system modules (laser shearography unit, crawling robot, climbing robot and overarching control system).
Ground tests involving the deployment and operation of the blade crawling robot and detection of artificial defects using the SheaRIOS system were also performed as a precursor to the full system validation trials, which will be performed at height on an operational wind turbine at the Greek Centre for Renewable Energy Sources (CRES) in the coming months. These trials will involve semi-autonomous wind turbine blade inspection, without the customary need for rope access technicians working in sometimes perilous conditions.
You can find out more about the project here, and look out for subsequent project news items for further information on project progress and details of the SheaRIOS system performance in ‘real-life’ inspection applications.
Figure 1. SheaRIOS blade crawling robot performing shearographic inspection on a section of wind turbine blade
Figure 2. Artificial defect successfully detected by the SheaRIOS blade crawling robot with shearographic inspection payload (i.e. classic ‘butterfly’ shearogram indication)
This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research programme under grant agreement No 780662