Regular inspections of important civil infrastructures are mandatory to ensure structural safety and reliability. Until today, these inspections are primarily conducted manually, which has several deficiencies. In context of prestressed concrete structures, steel tendons can be susceptible to stress corrosion cracking, which may result in breakage of individual wires that is visually not observable. Recent research therefore suggests Acoustic Emission Monitoring for wire break detection in prestressed concrete structures. However, in noisy environments, such as wind turbines, conventional acoustic emission detection based on user-defined amplitude thresholds may not be suitable. Thus, we propose the use of matched filters for acoustic emission detection in noisy environments and apply the proposed method to the task of wire break detection in post-tensioned wind turbine towers. Based on manually conducted wire breaks and rebound hammer tests on a large-scale test frame, we employ a brute-force search for the most suitable query signal of a wire break event and a rebound hammer impact, respectively. Then, we evaluate the signal detection performance on more than 500 other wire break signals and approximately one week of continuous acoustic emission recordings in an operating wind turbine. For a signal-to-noise ratio of 0 dB, the matched filter approach shows an improvement in AUC by up to 0.78 for both, the wire break and the rebound hammer query signal, compared to state-of-the-art amplitude-based detection. Even for the unscaled wire break measurements originally recorded at the 12 m large laboratory test frame, the improvement in AUC still lies between 0.01 and 0.25 depending on the wind turbine noise recordings considered for evaluation. Matched filters may therefore be a promising alternative to amplitude-based detection algorithms and deserve particular consideration with regard to Acoustic Emission Monitoring, especially in noisy environments or when sparse senor networks are required.

The growing significance of wind energy in supplying renewable electricity underlines the increasing importance of wind turbine efficiency. Hybrid towers, integrating steel and pre-stressed concrete in a stacked structure, address traditional limitations in nacelle height but face new vulnerabilities, exemplified by a collapse in September 2021. This highlights the crucial need for continuous monitoring, particularly of the tower structure’s tendons. This study introduces acoustic emission monitoring as a novel approach for the early detection of wire breaks within the highly stressed tendons of hybrid towers. The investigations described focus on evaluating the suitability of this method for the specific use case and developing a generalized monitoring approach. Accordingly, background noise in an operating wind turbine tower was recorded and analyzed over a year-long operational period. Correlation analyses of these data unveiled intricate relationships between operational parameters and noise levels, with wind speed, rotor speed, and blade pitch angle exerting influence. Laboratory experiments were conducted on a full-scale specimen, and wire breaks were artificially provoked to characterize the damage signal and assess its attenuation in relevant structural components. The experimental results were integrated into a stochastic model to determine feasible sensor distances, aiming for a 90% probability of detection at a 95% confidence level. Low attenuation along the tendon was identified, enabling reliable detection over significant distances. Nevertheless, practical considerations suggest a focus on tendon anchorages, with the potential for grouped monitoring in specific areas to optimize sensor deployment. The study proposes a sensor network configuration to enhance the safety and reliability of wind turbine structures.

Aging bridge infrastructure appears to become a major challenge in many industrialized countries. Numerous bridges are in bad condition and the current pace of repair and replacement as well as the available financial resources hence demand for a reliable bridge monitoring to facilitate an extended operation period of existing bridges. Nowadays, prestressed concrete bridges are prevalent among other construction types but may suffer from stress corrosion cracking of steel tendons. To detect wire breaks in bridge tendons, recent research suggests the use of acoustic emission analysis. In this work, we propose the use of semi-supervised learning techniques for anomaly detection to detect wire breaks in tendons of prestressed concrete bridges. Particularly, we utilize only acoustic emissions due to traffic and other environmental influences, recorded on a real bridge in operation, to initialize the local outlier factor algorithm. We then apply the initialized local outlier factor algorithm to two separate datasets with more than 500 wire break signals recorded on two different types of bridge girders. It is shown that the anomaly-based approach outperforms a supervised k-nearest neighbors classifier trained using wire breaks from only one girder. An evaluation on the wire break signals from the second bridge girder, not seen during the training phase, shows an improvement of the average recall score from 38 % to more than 99 % for the anomaly-based approach compared to the supervised k-nearest neighbors classifier. Considering the diversity of bridge constructions and the fact that availability of acoustic emission signals due to wire breaks is limited, semi-supervised learning seems to be a suitable approach for wire break detection. Furthermore, acoustic emissions due to normal environmental and operational conditions could be easily and cost-effectively recorded during an initialization phase of any monitoring system and thus be utilized to initialize an anomaly detector for each specific infrastructure.