Health Monitoring of Offshore Wind Structures: Sensing Technology, Uncertainty, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Offshore wind farms are rapidly expanding into deeper and more remote ocean regions. Their structural safety and operational reliability in harsh marine environments have garnered widespread global attention. Sensing technologies capture structural and environmental conditions and are indispensable to structural monitoring. Accordingly, this review examines the applications of environmental monitoring, supervisory control and data acquisition, condition monitoring, and structural health monitoring systems covering both the horizontal-axis and vertical-axis types of fixed and floating offshore wind turbines. It also summarizes key technologies for data transmission and optimal sensor placement. However, uncertainty in sensing data can significantly affect monitoring results, yet existing studies lack an adequate summary and in-depth discussion. We therefore focus on sources of sensing uncertainty, including the marine environment, the host platform, variations in environmental and operational conditions, and sparse sensing. By analyzing their effects on monitoring data, we explore key methods for overcoming data uncertainties and improving sensing accuracy. This paper also evaluates the application potential of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and digital twin technologies. Furthermore, the study points out that fusing multi-source signal data to establish a highly reliable intelligent decision-making and early warning framework is likely to become an important development direction for offshore wind power monitoring. This review aims to provide valuable support for the safe development of offshore wind farms towards deep-sea regions over the coming decades.