Machine Learning Aided Prediction of Rain Erosion Damage on Wind Turbine Blade Sections

Abstract Rain erosion of wind turbine blades represents an interesting topic of study due to its non-negligible impact on annual energy production of the wind farms installed in rainy sites. A considerable amount of recent research works has been oriented to this subject, proposing rain erosion modelling, performance losses prediction, structural issues studies, etc. This work aims to present a new method to predict the damage on a wind turbine blade. The method is applied here to study the effect of different rain conditions and blade coating materials, on the damage produced by the rain over a representative section of a reference 5MW turbine blade operating in normal turbulence wind conditions.