Vibration monitoring of wind-turbine blades through optical fiber sensors

In this work a wind turbine blade has been instrumented with two different types of optical fiber sensors. The first one is a traditional chain of Fiber Bragg Grating sensors, able to measure a large number of strain values along the fiber; the second one is a sensor based on Optical Backscatter reflectometry (OBR), able to provide a continuous measurement along the fiber. The two fibers are placed in parallel on the structure and different experimental tests have been carried out to compare the two technologies on a reduced-scale model of a offshore wind turbine blade