Designing of new generation offshore wind turbine blades is a great challenge as size of blades are getting larger (typically larger than 100 m). Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), which uses embedded Fiber Optics Sensors (FOSs), is incorporated in critical stressed zones such as trailing edges and spar webs. When FOS are embedded within composites, a 'penny shape' region of resin concentration is formed around the section of FOS. The size of so-formed defects are depending on diameter of the FOS. Penny shape defects depend of FOS diameter. Consequently, care must be given to embed in composites reliable sensors that are as small as possible. The way of FOS placement within composite plies is the second critical issue. Previous research work done in this field (1) investigated multiple linear FOS and sinusoidal FOS placement, as well. The authors pointed out that better structural coverage of the critical zones needs some new concepts. Therefore, further advancement is proposed in the current article with novel FOS placement (anti-phasic sinusoidal FOS placement), so as to cover more critical area and sense multi-directional strains, when the wind blade is in-use. The efficiency of the new positioning is proven by numerical and experimental study.
Keywords: fiber optic sensor; finite element analysis (FEA); numerical modeling; smart composite material; strain sensing; structural health monitoring (SHM).