The RTDT Research Affiliate Programme space
RTDT Laboratories is an ETH Zurich spin-off developing a universal tech stack for Structural Health Monitoring as a service of wind energy assets, for cloud and edge. The RTDT Research Affiliate Programme brings together researchers with real data and WeDoWind Challenges from the industry in order to create state-of-the-art open-source models and analysis tools for wind turbine SHM.
The current challenge in this space is the ASCE-EMI Structural Health Monitoring for Wind Energy Challenge, which starts on May 17th, 2024! The challenge is part of the WeDoWind RTDT Research Affiliate Programme space, and is run in collaboration with the ASCE Structural Health Monitoring & Control Committee.
As wind turbines become larger and more difficult to monitor on-site, the need for remote structural health monitoring (SHM) solutions is increasing. However, the wind energy industry has not yet concluded on a go-to practice for SHM of wind energy structures, with research efforts on efficient methods and tools still underway. In this challenge, the aim is to offer a platform for the comparison of existing methods and development of new SHM schemes for wind energy together! Based on a open dataset, we here focus on unsupervised methods for classifying faults.
The goal of this challenge is to detect three fault events with the highest possible accuracy. The fault events are:
1. Pitch drive failure
2. Aerodynamic imbalance
3. Icing event
For each fault event, the method applied should be clearly outlined, with an explicit description of the datasets used for training, testing and validation. Additionally, the results should be appropriately quantified via use of a confusion matrix, and a tabularised reporting of the accuracy, precision, recall and F-score metrics.
The data used in this challenge is the "Aventa AV-7 ETH Zurich Research Wind Turbine SCADA and high frequency Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) data", available on Zenodo here.
The final report will be evaluated by our Evaluation Panel, consisting of SHM experts from the ASCE Structural Health Monitoring & Control Committee. The following criteria will be considered:
- The reporting of the employed method and the novelty of the adopted approach.
- The ranking of the delivered, accuracy, precision, recall and F-scores for the schemes that are tried out.
The submissions will be assigned overall scores and published as an anonymous ranking table on the Relight platform. First prize, second prize and third prize will be awarded, and each participant who submits a final report and fills out the participant survey will receive a participation certificate. The participants have the option to contribute their results to a collaborative journal paper.
Why participate?
- Access real SHM data from operating wind turbines.
- Receive a participation certificate from ASCE Structural Health Monitoring & Control Committee.
- Get the chance to win a prize!
- Work together with other researchers, students and professionals from all over the world.
- Learn about state-of-the-art SHM techniques and evaluation methods.
- Make new connections, develop new ideas, and get creative!
- Be part of our WeDoWind Open Innovation Ecosystem, consisting of 500+ people from 30+ countries, where you can access other challenges and teaching resources on a range of wind energy related topics.
Find out more
Select the RTDT Research Affiliate Programme space in the form below to get an invite to the launch webinar on May 17th, 2024.