Abstract

This paper presents a method for damage identification of wind turbine blades based on vibration data and machine learning (ML) techniques and their validation using experimental data collected at different states of artificially-induced damage. The acceleration responses collected from accelerometers placed along the blades are preprocessed according to the type of network used for damage diagnosis. The ML approach is a supervised strategy in which a multilayered perceptron (MLP) takes a vector of damage-sensitive features, calculated from the acceleration time series. The accuracy of the approach is evaluated, and the effects of the operational and environmental variables (EOV) are discussed.