Structural health monitoring of wind turbines using a low-cost portable k-band radar: An ab-initio field investigation

This paper addresses an ab-initio field investigation around using low-cost portable radars to capture coherent Doppler signatures of wind turbines for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. A handheld low-cost K-band radar sensor is employed to point at the blades of a turbine, and their Doppler signatures from different angles and distances are measured. In particular, spectrograms are built and analyzed. Preliminary results show that the derived Doppler information can be related to physical and kinematical features of the blades. This leads to a great potential of these low-cost radar sensors for real-time wind-turbine SHM.