In this paper, a fatigue damage detection system used for wind turbine blade is successfully developed by using high-spatial-resolution differential pulse-width pair Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (DPP-BOTDA) sensing system. A piece of polarization-maintaining optical fiber is bonded on the blade surface to form the distributed sensing network. A DPP-BOTDA system, with a spatial resolution of 20cm and sampling interval of 1cm, is adopted to measuring distributed strain and detecting fatigue damage of wind turbine blade during fatigue test using the differential pulse pair of 39.5ns/41.5ns. Strain and the Brillouin gain spectra changes from undamaged state to fatigue failure are experimentally presented. The experimental results reveal that fatigue damage changes the strain distribution especially around the high strain area, and the width, amplitude and central frequency of the Brillouin gain spectra are sensitive to fatigue damage as the stiffness degradation and accumulated cracks change local strain gradient. As the damage becomes larger, the width of the Brillouin gain spectra becomes broader. Consequently, location and size of fatigue damage could be estimated. The developed system shows its potentiality for developing highly reliable wind turbine monitoring system as the effectiveness of damage detection and distributed sensing.
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