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The development of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based distributed strain sensor system for real time structural health monitoring of a wind turbine rotor and its validation under a laboratory scale test setup is discussed in this paper. A 1 kW, 1.6 m diameter rotor, horizontal axis wind turbine with three instrumented blades is used in this study. The sensor system consists of strain sensors, surface mounted at various locations on the blade. At first the sensors are calibrated under static loading conditions to validate the FBG mounting and the proposed data collection techniques. Then, the capability of the sensor system coupled with the operational modal analysis (OMA) methods to capture natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes in terms of distributed strains are validated under various non-rotating dynamic loading conditions. Finally, the sensor system is tested under rotating conditions using the wind flow …