Effective AE source location of damages in the wind turbine blade.

Acoustic emission (AE) has emerged as a powerful nondestructive tool to detect preexisting defects or to characterize failure mechanisms. Recently, this technique or this kind of principle, that is an in-situ monitoring of inside damages of materials or structures, becomes increasingly popular for monitoring the integrity of large structures like a huge wind blade. Therefore, it is required to find a symptom of damage propagation before catastrophic failure through a continuous monitoring. In this study, we have tried to develop a source location algorithm for damage identification on the part of real wind turbine blade. First, it was focused to understand the activities of acoustic emission events generated from the glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) structures such as a wind blade. Secondly, this study aims to identify and locate the damages from blade specimens. In this work, the activities of AE signals generated from external artificial sources was evaluated and located by new developed source location algorithm. The results show that new suggested source location algorithm was much higher performance than conventional source location method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]