Title: Impacts of SHM in Wind Energy Farm Performance

Organisers: Abdollah Malekjafarian (University College Dublin), Vikram Pakrashi (University College Dublin), Eleni Chatzi (ETH Zürich)

Structural Health Monitoring critically contributes to ensuring the safety, resilience, and optimal operation and maintenance of wind turbine structures. The reduction of operation and maintenance costs could significantly contribute to decreasing the cost of energy generated by wind farms, in turn fostering their broader acceptance and exploitation as a renewable energy resource. This special session invites contributions reporting on SHM techniques and algorithms, which beyond reporting improvements on the individual unit level (wind turbine) offer insights into the benefits harnessed at the farm level. This includes recent developments on system-level or population-based health management for offshore and onshore wind farms with an aim to improve reliability and availability while optimizing maintenance costs.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following aspects:
• Structural Health Monitoring techniques and algorithms with a view to optimizing performance at the wind farm level
• Farm-level reliability-centered maintenance techniques
• Monitoring and modelling of wind field characteristics and load-critical effects, such as wakes, at the farm level
• Recent methods for combining multiple emulators for developing and testing SHM techniques
• The impact of dynamic load estimation on turbine monitoring at farm level
• Applications making use of field monitoring information and real farm-level data are particularly welcomed