Abstract
The research presented considers the design, development and building of a structure-based condition monitoring system. A series of physical experiments were designed and conducted in a wind tunnel. This was able to initially prove the feasibility of the proposed system. Using a simulation of the continuous turbine rotation the self-initiated Phase-Angle curve was defined. The algorithms so produced were validated and tested using both the simulated waveforms and experimental data sets. This demonstrated that the proposed monitoring system was able to deal with the ever-changing flow conditions and turbine operation status. The work showed that the use of the wind tunnel was feasible for developing the structure-based monitoring system. It has been shown that innovative ideas can be tested and validated in the wind tunnel. The relatively small size of the test rig and the utility of 3-D printing technology made the whole experiment based investigation very cost-effective. The progressive experiments were conducted to compare widely used monitoring techniques to the proposed monitoring system. Some other physical phenomenon or extended thoughts such as blade tip deflection caused by the tower were considered and may be of interest to other researchers. The final discussion of the work presented was to introduce the potential problems and difficulties in applying the proposed system in the marine environment. This considered the sensor design, system installation, application methods and algorithm optimisation. This could further serve the useful information for the relevant researchers and the experiment or deployment of the proposed system on full-size turbine.