Improvement of Productivity and Quality in Wind Energy Industry Through use of Advance Sensor Systems

Renewable energy from wind has become an important economic factor over the last decades. As well as in many other industrial sectors, two key success factors are the high productivity at low cost and the high quality. This paper focuses on the improvement of these factors for rotor blades manufacturing. Our approach compromises methods from Industry 4.0 and utilises a new intelligent sensor system which enables a real-time monitoring of on-going resin properties during the manufacturing process of the rotor blade. The development of the sensor system was performed on different levels, starting on lab-scale and ending in real production processes. Durable non-intrusive sensors as well as flexible sensors have been used for the sensing of resin arrival, viscosity and curing as well as to reveal mixing ratio deviations. The sensor system post-processes the data and provides real-time material state information (viscosity, degree of cure and glass transition temperature) and all the necessary information for process automation and control. The investigations on lab- and full-scale test show the high potential of the sensor system for automating a significant part of the production in the wind energy industry.