Autonomous surface inspection of wind turbine blades for quality assurance in production

This paper defines a method, and associated automated system, for production inline inspection of the surface geometry of wind turbine blades which can be plugged directly into existing production facilities without changing the setup. During current production, turbine blades are manually inspected, and this system aims at automating this process.

Various geometrical defects can occur in the surface during production and these defects can lead to shortened life times and lowered power output of the turbine. Automating the inspection process requires a method which is at least as sensitive as the currently used manual process while significantly lowering the time consumption.

It is shown that the proposed method is fast and has the potential to deliver the high precision and resolution needed to resolve both small and large scale surface defects.