SAS_Wind_Turbines_Pressure_Sensors
SAS_Wind_Turbines_Pressure_Sensors
Conference Paper
Author(s):
von Däniken, Elias ; Mikhaylov, Denis ; Moallemi, Amirhossein; Polonelli, Tommaso ; Magno, Michele
Publication date:
2024
Permanent link:
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000690066
Rights / license:
In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted
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Tiny On-Device Structural Health Monitoring for
Wind Turbines Using MEMS Pressure Sensors
Elias von Däniken Denis Mikhaylov Amirhossein Moallemi Tommaso Polonelli Michele Magno
D-ITET D-ITET DEI D-ITET D-ITET
ETH Zürich ETH Zürich University of Bologna ETH Zürich ETH Zürich
Zürich, Switzerland Zürich, Switzerland Bologna, Italy Zürich, Switzerland Zürich, Switzerland
0009-0002-6100-8818 0000-0003-2427-8958 0000-0002-7973-5493 0000-0003-0405-3612 0000-0003-0368-8923
Abstract—Wind turbines are extensively used as a renewable fore, the primary approach is to time-schedule data collection
source of energy. These turbines are exposed to turbulence with pre-determined intervals to be transmitted to the cloud
and highly variable weather conditions such as wind, rain, and for storage and processing [5]. While being effective so far,
ice, which can cause significant damage and degraded power
generation performance if not detected in time. The emergence this approach imposes limitations in terms of damage detection
of the Industry 4.0 paradigm enables a reduction in maintenance latency and data traffic volumes. Low-power wireless links are
costs and increased efficiency. Recent research has demonstrated often slow (<1 Mbps), requiring several minutes to forward
the possibility of monitoring the aerodynamic performance of the the data for processing. Moreover, in the case of a wind farm,
wind turbine directly from the blades with today’s state-of-the- the wireless channel can be easily saturated when several tens
art wireless monitoring systems. However, these need external
support to process and analyze the collected data. This paper of devices are transmitting simultaneously [3]. Furthermore,
proposes an effective tiny machine learning approach to monitor current Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) solutions for
the blade structural integrity directly onboard the sensor node, wind turbine blades focus mainly on vibration-based analyses,
requiring only 3 kB of RAM and 35 kB of Flash running on such as modal analysis, assuming a correlation between struc-
a low-power ARM Cortex-M4F at 48MHz. We experimentally tural anomalies and spectral components. However, surface
evaluate the proposed model with a dataset acquired in a wind
tunnel with 40 MEMS barometers placed around the airfoil in 6 damage or corrosion can be invisible for this vibration-based
different damage conditions. The XGBoost classification model is approach despite decreasing energy generation efficiency. For
purely based and trained on the blade aerodynamics, featuring these reasons, alternatives to SoA approaches still need to
a classification accuracy above 83% over 6 labeled classes of be investigated based on other physical sources, such as the
increasing damage. With a total execution time of 579 ms while it airflow behavior around the blade airfoil, to extract additional
only consumes 9 mJ, it enables real-time analysis for a sustainable
battery-based monitoring system. operative health indicators.
Index Terms—SHM, wind turbines, tinyML, edge computing,
Industry 4.0 This paper focuses on the twofold research challenge of
enabling on-device and near zero-latency SHM of wind tur-
bine blades using a novel approach based on aerodynamic
I. I NTRODUCTION
measurements of the pressure distribution around the blade
Today, wind energy is considered one of the most important surface. More specifically, the contributions of this work are as
technologies to significantly reduce CO2 emissions and help follows: (i) A blade damage detection tiny Machine Learning
mitigate global warming based on the recently agreed EU (tinyML) model based on a recently released open source
targets [1]. For the widespread adoption of wind turbines as a dataset [6] featuring 6 damage classes. The XGBoost model
power source, it is essential to optimize maintenance costs and can detect a crack with varying severity, from 5 mm to 20 mm,
operation efficiency while reducing negative environmental and a classification accuracy above 83 %. Unlike previous SoA
impacts [2]. Current industry trends in this field call for real- publications based on vibration analysis, this work focuses
time and always-on monitoring systems not only on the elec- only on aerodynamic features acquired through an array of 40
tric generator and the tower but also including a deeper under- barometers placed around the blade surface. (ii) A computa-
standing of the blade aerodynamics and working load during tionally optimized feature extraction algorithm to preprocess
normal operations [3]. Specifically for offshore wind farms, acquired barometric data into a lower dimensional representa-
where high installation and periodic maintenance costs require tion. Starting from an input matrix of [40×512], the algorithm
a high volume of generated electricity to be commercially reduces it to [20 × 512] and subsequently to a list of extracted
viable, wind turbines operate in turbulent airflow, encountering features, such as mean, variance, skew, and kurtosis, with
strong and sometimes sudden wind speed changes, which can dimension [5 × 20]. (iii) A robust data handling approach
cause significant load fluctuations, reducing the programmed supporting missing or faulty sensors, which is a common
lifespan and decreasing maintenance intervals [4]. situation for sensor nodes deployed in harsh environments
Current State of the Art (SoA) on continuous blade moni- such as offshore wind turbines. The proposed methodology
toring is based on wireless and low-power sensor nodes with is autonomously able to detect faulty barometers and discard
limited computational capabilities and energy onboard. There- them. Thanks to the redundant information from an array
of 40 barometers, the model can work with up to 50 % of around the airfoil have only been measured indirectly via audio
invalid input data. (iv) An optimized implementation of the emission or anomalous vibrations [4], [13].
crack detection model to run completely onboard the sensor Moreover, all the methods above are inherently limited
node used to acquire the dataset [6]. The model classifier by steps (ii) and (iii) since they outsource the data analysis
runs in 3.4 ms, while feature extraction takes an extra 575 ms and damage classification to remote servers. However, this
on a 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M4F with 80 kB of RAM. To approach limits system performance due to the bottleneck
process the data onboard and execute the tinyML classification generated by the data transfer and increases the system latency
model, only 9 mJ of energy is consumed. Our model features a response from minutes to even hours [14]. Transferring large
classifier with 8.6 k parameters stored in Flash memory, while numbers of samples via low-power wireless link is a slow
feature extraction takes only 3 kB of RAM excluding data process, often involving a bit rate below 1 Mbps [3].
buffers. The full damage detection pipeline runs in 579 ms, Therefore, this paper focuses on the open challenge of
while the acquisition of an input window takes 5 s; allowing detecting structural damages via aerodynamic measurements
real-time and continuous monitoring. acquired through an array of 40 barometers placed on the blade
Therefore, this paper not only proposes a unique approach surface. At the same time, the proposed anomaly detection
for structural health monitoring on wind turbines but also model runs completely onboard the sensor node, featuring a
decreases the overall system energy consumption by a factor latency below 1 s.
of 13× compared to SoA without onboard processing solu- III. DATASET
tions [3], [5]. This is because data transmission from the sensor
node for remote processing would require 117 mJ and 1 s, This work utilizes the open source dataset in [6]. It was
even before the energy consumption of the remote processing collected using the Aerosense system [3], [5] composed of
system is taken into account. a single sensor node which is described further below. The
test depicted in Figure 1 is conducted to mimic a progressive
II. R ELATED W ORKS structural degradation of a wind turbine blade by applying
damage in the form of an artificial crack. It consists of six
SHM and predictive maintenance are an active topic in the damage classes. The first two cases are with an undamaged
recent advancement of Industry 4.0 [7]. Specifically, SHM cantilever beam; one of them is with an added mass of 246 g
is particularly attractive for wind turbines, where an active mounted 116 cm from the base. Then, the other 4 classes
research strand is pursuing different approaches [3], especially are with an increasing crack size, namely 5 mm, 10 mm,
with non-destructive techniques [2]. Generally, all SHM sys- 15 mm and 20 mm. For each class, the structure is excited
tems apply the following steps: (i) sensor data acquisition; at two different frequencies by the cantilever, namely 1.0 Hz
(ii) data transmission; (iii) signal processing; (iv) data inter- or 1.9 Hz, the wind speed is set to 10 m s−1 or 20 m s−1 the
pretation. [3], [7] For data acquisition, one can differentiate Angle of Attack (AoA) is set to either 0◦ or 8◦ , although for
between active and passive excitation. In active systems, an data quality reasons only the 0◦ AoA data is used in this work.
actuator excites the blade while an accelerometer measures the This results in 4 combinations for each damage class. For each
response [8]. This solution cannot be implemented outside a of these, 3 recordings exist, each approximately 150 s long.
research environment and thus is not discussed further. Mean- In detail, the dataset includes 228 experiments of ≈2 min
while, global passive measurement approaches are mostly each including 40 barometric traces sampled at 100 Hz, 5
vibration-based, detecting the modal frequency variations of acceleration signals placed at different blade positions sampled
the structure under study. In this case, arrays of accelerometers at 2 kHz, a front-facing video recording, and a stream-wise
are often employed. Conversely, local measurements focus motion capture.
on individual parts of the blade, e.g., using strain gauges to The dataset [6] was collected in an open wind tunnel,
detect structural deformations in predetermined locations [9]. featuring a test section of 40 cm × 40 cm. The measurement
Further, acoustic phenomena have been investigated to detect system was mounted onto a cross-section of a 3D-printed
crack formation, delamination, corrosion, and debonding [10], NACA633418 airfoil with a chord length of 16 cm. The width
[11]. In addition to the sensor-based approaches within or of the airfoil is 45 cm, and it is mounted onto a heaving
on the blade’s surface described above, other work has ap- cantilever beam made out of aluminum with the dimensions
plied techniques to monitor turbine blades externally using of 1 cm × 4 cm, as depicted in Figure 1. At the tip of the
recent breakthroughs in computer vision and machine learning. cantilever, a small motor is mounted with an eccentric mass of
Drones equipped with cameras have been used to look for 80 g and a radius of 8 cm to induce a harmonic excitation. To
damage [12]. More recent devices can be deployed directly simulate an increasing crack size, the cantilever beam cross-
on the blade surface while in operation [3] to measure its section was reduced with a common metal saw. This reduction
aerodynamic behavior with arrays of barometers and differen- is located 10 cm away from the support of the cantilever (see
tial pressure sensors [5] without requiring any modification of Figure 1). To adjust the AoA, two airfoils were printed with
the blade itself. As there is a direct correlation between wind different ducts, one for an AoA of 0◦ and one for 8◦ . The
turbine efficiency and the blade aerodynamic performance, experimental setup has a Reynolds number Re of 1.28e5 at
i.e., the generated lift, monitoring it in real-time would be 10 m s−1 .
beneficial to predict detrimental events, such as structural The Aerosense system [3], [5] is a custom sensor node
and surface damage. However, so far air flow discrepancies system which features 40 Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems
0.18
0.20
0.22
0.24
CP
0.26
0.28
0.30
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 5 10 15 20 25
Time [s] # Samples
102 10
1
101
CP
100 0.5 1.5 2.1 5
10 1
0 10 20 30 40 50
Frequency [Hz]
Fig. 1. Dataset acquisition setup in [6]. The acquisition system comprises 5
accelerometers and 40 barometers installed on a cross-section of a 3D-printed Fig. 2. Typical barometric signal of a heaving airfoil in a wind tunnel in the
NACA633418 airfoil supported by a 160.5 cm aluminum bar. A crack of healthy state. The upper part shows the time domain and the distribution of
increasing severity is manually applied. the time series. From this distribution, simple temporal features are extracted.
The frequency domain is shown in the lower section, with the bandwidth of
the band-pass filter highlighted in red and magnified.
CP
the measurement redundancy of the acquisition system, with
100
the barometers placed a few millimeters apart. Maximum
accuracy was reached when using sensors covering all the
airfoil sections. For example, one cannot completely remove 10 1
1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.0 2.1
the sensors around the trailing edge. On the other hand, only Frequency [Hz]
using alternate sensors (with either odd or even index) as
inputs to the model halves the input dimension, and thus the Fig. 4. Frequency domain of the data zoomed in on the modal frequency of
the blade. A representative selection of the different damage classes is shown.
model complexity, while maintaining similar accuracy. The
reduction from [40×512] to [20×512] is shown in Figure 3. At
the same time, the remaining sensors can be used as a backup C. Data Augmentation
in case of hardware failure, ensuring correct system operation To increase the number of data points available for model
even if a large subset of barometers malfunction over time. For training and evaluation, two data augmentation strategies were
example, in [6], many experiments have been conducted with used. First, although data from only 20 of the 40 pressure
one or more faulty sensors. In Figure 3, the reducer block sensors is supplied to the model, the redundant sensor data
automatically discards channels providing meaningless data, was not discarded. Second, a striding mechanism with a stride
for example, if it is outside a realistic threshold or too variable. overlap of 50% was used in the windowing step for training
Assuming the sensor adjacent to a defective sensor is not also and validation data. No striding mechanism is used in the test
faulty, its data can be substituted for the neighboring defective set (see Section IV-D).
sensor without significantly affecting performance.
D. Classifier
B. Feature Extraction For the classifier, only architectures that are executable
on a resource-constrained microcontroller were considered.
As shown in Section III, the pressure signals are noisy, and Decision trees were chosen for two reasons. Firstly, they
the modal frequency component is often not very prominent. are one of the smallest model families in terms of memory
However, the clustering of the different damage classes can consumption. Secondly, decision trees have no library depen-
be seen in the frequency domain, as shown in Figure 4. The dencies, which are otherwise often an insurmountable problem
features were selected to be computationally and memory- when converting models from high-level languages such as
efficient to run in real-time on a low-power MicroController Python to plain ANSI C code. Specifically, gradient-boosted
Unit (MCU) while still allowing the model classes to be dis- trees (XGBoost) proved to be powerful and self-contained
tinguished. A total of 5 features were selected and computed classification architecture [15], especially since Python li-
using two separate signal paths, shown in Figure 3. The first braries exist to automatically generate C-code functions based
path computes four simple statistical features - the mean, on the pre-trained XGBoost model.
variance, skew, and kurtosis. The second path, composed of To train the crack classifier, the data set is split into a train
the Summation, FIR, and Hann Window blocks, measures the and a test set. Since the dataset has three recordings for each
energy of the modal frequency. First, a Hann-Window removes set of parameters, two were chosen for the training set and
artifacts in the frequency domain. Then, a band-pass filter is one for the test set. This results in a 66/33 train-test split.
applied featuring 200 taps, tuned to the modal frequency, start- In addition to the data augmentation strategies described in
ing from 1.5 Hz to 2.1 Hz. This is also indicated in Figure 2 Section IV-C, a stratified 10-fold cross-validation strategy was
by the red section in the frequency domain. After the filter, used during training to minimize model overfitting.
the vector is squared and summed, giving the signal energy by The training resulted in a classifier consisting of 60 es-
Parseval’s theorem. Since the signal contains only the modal timators per damage class. XGBoost internally creates an
frequency, this calculation gives a good approximation of the independent estimator per class, giving 360 estimators with
energy of the modal frequency of the signal, which can be a maximum depth of 4. In total, the estimators have 4126
used as a model feature. splits and 4488 leaves, resulting in 8614 parameters. Since
Notably, other than the modal frequency, each channel’s the parameters are saved as 32-bit floats, the model needs
DC component (mean) was an essential feature for damage approximately 35 kB of storage. The classifier achieves 84.1%
classification. From an aerodynamic perspective, it describes accuracy over 6 classes of damage, with an increasing crack
the flow distribution around the blade section and its aerody- size from 0 mm to 20 mm, on the test set executing in the
namic performance in generating suctions as expected. Thus, a training environment, also listed in Table I.
variance in the pressure distribution around the airfoil indicates
the blade’s structural behavior that can deviate from the orig- E. On-Device Implementation
inally intended response. Therefore, even if computationally To implement the model onto the Aerosense system in
lightweight, the channel mean is a fundamental indicator of real-time while minimizing energy consumption, the blade
the blade’s condition. monitoring pipeline of Figure 3 is implemented in C and
optimized explicitly for the DSP library of the ARM Cortex- TABLE I
M4F. C LASSIFICATION ACCURACY AND WEIGHTED PRECISION OF THE
PROPOSED PIPELINE DEPLOYED ON A P ERSONAL C OMPUTER (PC) AND
The feature extraction uses the ARM CMSIS library, specifi- THE ARM C ORTEX -M4F.
cally the DSP variant for the Cortex-M series. The first path of
the feature extraction contains the filter, as shown in Figure 3. PC (x86 Architecture) Aerosense (Cortex-M4F)
Accuracy 84.1% 83.1%
Next, the second path of feature extraction consists of the
Precision 84.4% 83.6%
statistical features. Also, the ARM CMSIS has built-in support
for the mean (x) and the variance (s2 ). Both are necessary
to compute the skew (g) and the kurtosis (w). Equation (1) Healthy 13.6% 0.0% 2.1% 0.0% 0.9% 0.1% 0.14
shows the formula for the intermediate values (zi ), which are
calculated once for every input window. H.with AM 0.5% 13.5% 0.2% 0.4% 0.0% 2.2% 0.12
0.10
5mm 2.5% 0.0% 12.2% 0.8% 1.1% 0.0%
i=0 i=0
xi − x 1 X 1 X 0.08
zi = (1) g= zi3 (2) k= zi4 (3)
s n n 10mm 0.9% 0.5% 1.6% 13.4% 0.0% 0.2%
n n 0.06