Operational Sensor Adjustment for Structural Health Monitoring Systems in Wind Turbines

The digitalization in structural engineering significantly amplified the importance of Structural Health Monitoring systems, especially in civil engineering and the renewable energy sector. Initially, after installation, a monitoring system needs to be adjusted. This paper presents three methods to adjust sensor offsets of tilt and acceleration in wind turbine towers. In the first method, we use an initiated 360-degree nacelle rotation and its unbalanced rotor weight-induced tower bending. In the second method, uniaxial operational data forms a database for a univariate regression. A third method uses a biaxial operational data set for a multivariate regression. The second and third approaches can be extended to any slender structure under environmental load. The presented workflow also allows for automated sensor orientation determination and fault detection due to long-term drift observation of sensor characteristics.