Blade Lifetime Extension for Offshore Wind
Physics-informed condition monitoring that reads fatigue off a blade’s load response — simulating damage on the IEA 15 MW reference turbine to detect anomalies and estimate remaining useful life.
Measured fatigue accumulation to NOW, dashed projection beyond — the amber crossing is the remaining-useful-life estimate against the end-of-life damage threshold.
PROBLEM
Offshore blades degrade in ways that are expensive to inspect and easy to miss — leading-edge erosion, structural softening, combined damage. Operators mostly discover the state of a blade when a technician rappels down it. The valuable question is continuous: given how this blade responds to the wind today, how much fatigue life is left in it?
APPROACH
A physics-informed pipeline built on OpenFAST aeroelastic simulation of the IEA 15 MW reference turbine under the ROSCO controller, so damage signatures emerge from realistic operational behaviour rather than idealised load cases. Thirteen predefined damage scenarios — leading-edge erosion, structural degradation, single-blade and combined cases — perturb aerodynamics and structure, mapped onto EPRI’s 23-category blade damage classification. Anomaly detection flags load responses that deviate from the healthy baseline, and fatigue damage accumulates into a remaining-useful-life estimate following IEC/DNV standards.
OUTCOME
A working lifetime-extension system exercised against open wind-farm SCADA case studies, and the physical-asset counterpart to the battery work: the same thesis applied to composites instead of cells. Whether the asset is a battery or a blade, the product is the same — an honest estimate of remaining life, priced into every operating decision.