Monitoring Wind Turbine Stresses with Wireless Solutions
The Problem:
An experimental wind turbine required 14 channels of strain measurement from 14 separate full Wheatstone bridges of 4 gauges. The gauges were positioned along the surfaces of the prototype blades. The rotation of the blades and height of the turbine made a wired solution impractical accompanied by the clients request to re-use the system on several prototype blades.
The Solution:
The solution came in the form of 14 x T24-SA telemetry strain gauge acquisition modules which were waterproofed within T24-ACMi acquisition connectivity modules also providing battery power and simple field terminals to ease connecting the various gauges. The modules all reported back to a single PC with one base station. The modules were all set to the same channel and provided readings 100 times per second. The T24-TK telemetry toolkit was used to monitor the data from all 14 x acquisition modules and log the data back to a CSV (comma separated variable file). Due to transmission collisions and the finite bandwidth of the telemetry system, only 25 to 30 readings were recorded from each of the 14 x acquisition modules every second, however the clients requirement was for only 10 readings per second. If a higher frequency of readings had been required, a single PC with multiple base stations on separate channels could have be deployed.
Products used in this application:
