Semi-autonomous Wind Blade Inspection by a RPAS

• Autor(a) principal: Antunes, Paulo Jorge Cunha
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7964
• topic: Energias Renováveis; Geradores Eólicos; Java; Manutenção; Rpas; Waypoints.; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Aeronáutica

Over many requirements that population growth brought, electric energy is one of them. Energy is present on our everyday life needs. It is becoming common for machinery to be powered by electric energy. This is a positive aspect regarding environment, once this is a green energy. In order to keep the demand required, it is a must to share the most of every electric source available, once that it is impossible for one to fulfill all the supply needs. One of the most suitable solutions to obtain this energy, is through renewable energy. Between them, wind provides great benefits, being expressed through the air, providing uncalculated power at our disposition. The most efficient way known to transfer this energy into electricity, is by Wind Turbines. These machines, due to their height and layout, are able to use the wind to spin their blades, converting kinetic energy into mechanical power. This technology, granting notable incomes, being this an industry rising in the recent years. Although, being these structures exposed to fatigue, by the extreme conditions such as sun, rain, between others, drastically limits the material life endurance and their efficiency. Being this a wide combination of factors, the industry that produces these components, lacks the capacity of predicting accurately the time that the parts should be replaced. Thus, it is a must to provide maintenance over them. Furthermore, due to their dimensions, these structures constitute a hindrance to provide proper inspection without much pecuniary aspects involved. Quadrotors are a type of RPAS which possess great maneuverability, stability and simplicity. Owing to this, becomes possible to perform surveillance on different types of structures, presenting a comfortable way to execute it on dangerous and difficult access spaces. The current work presents a solution to this problem statement, combining the RPAS, Phantom 4 of DJI, with the programming language Java, providing an application. With this, every user is allowed to produce a trajectory where the requirements can adapt to his needs, incorporating essential parameters to define a path over the Waypoints established, relying on geographic localization, producing a path through them. Improving this work to a completely autonomous inspection would bring total independency from the technician executing the maintenance, providing a viable and repeatable process, increasing the income of energy from Wind Turbines.