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In this presentation the main requirements of BAM-GGR 016 regarding maintenance and periodic inspections were explained. BAM ensures during acceptance of the quality management program that specific and relevant instructions for maintenance and periodic inspections are developed and handed to the operator of the packaging. Examples are given.
Turbine blades for gas turbines are exposed to extreme working conditions in a demanding environment. In-service inspection, maintenance and refurbishment of the heavily stressed parts is necessary to ensure both safety and efficiency, e.g. based on immersion ultrasound testing (UT).
In the course of NDE 4.0, the European project MRO 2.0 aims to innovate the maintenance, repair and overhaul of turbine blades by linking these with modern digital methods. For this, the goal of this project is to go beyond conventional automated and manual UT testing techniques.
The aim is to measure the actual geometry and wall thickness of the complex shaped parts by applying an adaptive TFM that takes into account the refraction of the ultrasonic waves at the transition from the coupling material (water) to the inspected part (steel). In this setup the phased array probe is held by a robotic arm that allows the part to be scanned while remaining mainly perpendicular to the inspected surface. In this way, even complex geometries can be inspected and a 3D model of the actual condition of the part can be created.
The laboratory setup is equipped with a Vantage 64 phased array instrument from Verasonics Inc. and an industrial robot from ABB. A 64 element linear array probe operating at 10 MHz is attached to the robot.
The focus is on optimizing resolution, reliability and inspection speed, as the reconstructed model will be fed to the digital twin at a later stage of the project and used for targeted repairs. In addition to enhancing the reconstruction algorithms, required probe geometry and the parameters needed to inspect turbine blades with partially thin walls and anisotropic materials will also be investigated.
This talk will describe the 3-year project and present the results of the first year. The main focus will be on the development of the reconstruction algorithms used and the experimental setup.
In this presentation, a framework for integrating vibration-based structural health monitoring data into the optimization of inspection and maintenance of deteriorating structural systems is presented. The framework is demonstrated in an illustrative example considering a steel frame subject to fatigue.
Up to now, the inspection of wind turbines by industrial climbers has been considered "state of the art". However, many aspects like ever-larger wind turbines, minimizing the risk for man and machine and the advancing digitalization make modern and automated inspection methods indispensable. A particular interest here is contactless and remote methods that can be used with drones instead of climbing robots. The work presented here contributes to the long-term goal of making autonomous and advanced inspections of wind turbine rotor blades using drones ready for industrial use.
Besides visual inspection, only a few inspection methods are capable of non-contact inspection on an industrial scale. Passive thermography can serve as such a contactless and digital inspection method and is well known for its applications in the inspection of buildings or electrical circuits. It can even sense both near-surface and subsurface defects. The sensitivity to subsurface defects makes one advantage of thermography over visual inspections. As a digital inspection method, it is generally also more objective and offers more comparability. For example, defects and their extent can be easily monitored and compared over time. However, its industrial application relies on thermal gradients in the inspected object such that a temperature contrast exists between damaged and sound areas. This also applies to large unheated structures such as wind turbine rotor blades, which do not have an intrinsic temperature gradient and at the same time cannot be easily heated externally.
Under certain weather conditions, a change of the environmental temperature or the solar loading conditions can provide the necessary thermal gradients to make passive thermography viable for the in-service inspection of rotor blades. For a reliable use of passive thermography on "thermal passive" components, the incorporation of these environmental conditions in the planning and evaluation of thermal inspections is crucial.
Compared to many other objects and buildings, wind turbine blades have varying and often unknown complex internal structures depending on the model. A special method is therefore required, that can be used independently of the internal structure of the blades and that relates the individual thermograms of the three rotor blades to each other. This allows the distinction between the thermal response of design-specific structural features and damages or irregularities between the three blades.
In this work we present thermal signatures of rotating in-service rotor blades taken under industrial relevant conditions. These thermograms show surface and subsurface damages and irregularities which we contrast with structural design features by referencing the three blades to each other. In addition, we examine the strong influence of different weather conditions on the inspection results. A direct comparison of measured results with inspection reports from industrial climbers serves as a benchmark.
Until today, the optical inspection of rotor blades by industrial climbers is considered state of the art. However, both more and larger rotor blades and the increasing digitalization of maintenance work make modern inspection methods increasingly necessary. In this context, passive thermography can serve as a useful digital technique for in-service inspection of wind turbine blades. Unlike active thermography, this inspection method does not require an active heat source but takes advantage of heating by the sun and diurnal temperature fluctuations. This allows inspections from the ground during operation and does not require shutting down the wind turbine. However, an inspection with passive thermography is highly weather dependent. Thus, the already weak thermal signatures formed due to internal structures and possible internal damage are only strong enough under certain weather conditions.
To obtain meaningful inspection results despite the relatively small thermal differences between intact and defective components, three aspects are crucial:
1. Measurements should be taken at the time of optimum weather conditions. It must be kept in mind that different internal damage will be revealed by thermal signatures under different weather conditions.
2. The thermal signature of the rotor blades, including possible damages, must be simulated with FEM simulations. In this way, the influence of different weather conditions can be predicted but also understood in the aftermath.
3. The temperature differences between identically designed and assembled rotor blades must be considered to analyze variations between blades.
This work will address all these aspects and show, based on field measurements under industrial conditions (exemplarily shown in figure 1), laboratory measurements and FEM simulations, which steps must be taken to establish passive thermography as an industrial inspection method.
Nondestructive testing of gas turbine blades is essential for their maintenance and service process which is critical to ensure both safety and efficiency of these highly stressed parts. In this presentation, a novel ultrasonic testing method is explored in order to acquire part thickness information in the turbine blade’s airfoil. In established industry processes, the measurements are mainly carried out manually and only at a few specific positions of the inspected parts. The proposed method scans the part using a robot arm guiding an ultrasonic array sensor. For ultrasonic coupling to the complex-shaped surface geometry, the inspected part and sensor are immersed into water. A two-step TFM[1, 2] (Total Focusing Method) approach is used to reconstruct the outer and inner surfaces subsequently from the ultrasonic raw data, which are acquired using the FMC[3] (Full Matrix Capture) measurement principle. For each sensor position, the location and geometry of the outer surface is first identified and then used to create an image of an area inside the material. From that image, the inner surface is reconstructed. Finally, part thickness information is deducted from merging location data of inner and outer surface. The result is a high resolution, high precision mapping of the inspected part’s wall thickness.