Development of a strain gauge for monitoring system that can be applied to wind turbine blades stress testing in the laboratory

This document will provide information about the approach that used to get the reading information from the wind blade in laboratory. This part is mainly focusing on getting a signal reading from a strain gauge to Arduino. The development of this project was based upon the requirement to study the effect of the turbulence that might affect the wind turbine blade. The investigation of the load that the blade experienced will then be analysed to ensure the wind turbine is able to maximise the production and also take into account the safety issues that arise according to the standard after project design constructing and implementation occurred in the real system. This document will show the details of the instruments and the design approach that enabled capturing of the load data in a controlled environment. In field testing, strain gauges on the root of turbine blades capture the blade flapwise and edgewise loading. This project focuses on development of a monitoring system to capture strain gauge data. To simplify the experiment, strain gauge are loaded in the controlled environment of a laboratory. A programme and a setup to implement this project has been developed at this. A results gathered in Chapter 4 Result and Analysis documented throughout this stage will be more reliable, proven and realistic if the content of this document is demonstrated on the real wind blade that located in Pilot Plant area. However, to develop the full functionality of this project, a person also needs to understand the transmitter and receiver aspects of the project. The establishment of the basic data logging for the main project was achieved based on the result collected.