Machine Learning-Based Damage Diagnosis in Floating Wind Turbines Using Vibration Signals: A Lab-Scale Study Under Different Wind Speeds and Directions

Floating wind turbines (FWTs) operate in offshore environments under harsh and varying operating conditions, making frequent in situ monitoring dangerous for maintenance teams and costly for operators. Remote and automated diagnosis, including the stages of detection, identification, and severity characterization of early stage damages in FWTs through advanced vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) methods of the machine learning (ML) type, is evidently critical for timely repairs, extending their operational lifecycle, reducing maintenance costs, and enhancing safety. This study investigates, for the first time, the complete (all stages) damage diagnosis problem by employing well-established ML SHM methods and conducting hundreds of experiments on a lab-scale FWT model operating under different wind speeds and directions, both in healthy and damaged states. The latter include two distinct blade cracks of limited length, two added masses attached to the blade edge simulating possible accumulation of ice, and connection degradation at the mounting of the main tower with the floater. The results indicate that the proper training of advanced ML methods using damage-sensitive feature vectors that represent the structural dynamics within the entire frequency bandwidth of measurements may achieve flawless damage diagnosis, reaching 100% success at all diagnosis stages, even when only a minimal number of vibration signals from a limited number of sensors (a single sensor in this study) are used.