Aerial Infrared Health Monitoring of Solar Photovoltaic Farms at Scale

Solar photovoltaic (PV) farms represent a major source of global renewable energy generation, yet their true operational efficiency often remains unknown at scale. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, data-driven framework for large-scale airborne infrared inspection of North American solar installations. Leveraging high-resolution thermal imagery, we construct and curate a geographically diverse dataset encompassing thousands of PV sites, enabling machine learning-based detection and localization of defects that are not detectable in the visible spectrum. Our pipeline integrates advanced image processing, georeferencing, and airborne thermal infrared anomaly detection to provide rigorous estimates of performance losses. We highlight practical considerations in aerial data collection, annotation methodologies, and model deployment across a wide range of environmental and operational conditions. Our work delivers new insights into the reliability of large-scale solar assets and serves as a foundation for ongoing research on performance trends, predictive maintenance, and scalable analytics in the renewable energy sector.

Barely-Visible Surface Crack Detection for Wind Turbine Sustainability

The production of wind energy is a crucial part of sustainable development and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. Maintaining the integrity of wind turbines to produce this energy is a costly and time-consuming task requiring repeated inspection and maintenance. While autonomous drones have proven to make this process more efficient, the algorithms for detecting anomalies to prevent catastrophic damage to turbine blades have fallen behind due to some dangerous defects, such as hairline cracks, being barely-visible. Existing datasets and literature are lacking and tend towards detecting obvious and visible defects in addition to not being geographically diverse. In this paper we introduce a novel and diverse dataset of barely-visible hairline cracks collected from numerous wind turbine inspections. To prove the efficacy of our dataset, we detail our end-to-end deployed turbine crack detection pipeline from the image acquisition stage to the use of predictions in providing automated maintenance recommendations to extend the life and efficiency of wind turbines.