Imperial College London > Talks@ee.imperial > COMMSP Seminar > Reliability, Dynamic Stability and Vibration Control of Wind Turbines

Reliability, Dynamic Stability and Vibration Control of Wind Turbines

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Danilo Mandic.

Malfunctioning of acceleration-sensitive equipment in wind turbines has the potential to affect their annual failure rates during normal operating conditions. Current protective measures for wind turbines are mostly triggered by wind speed. However, this option neglects the structural response of the wind turbines, and limits the possibility of effectively controlling accelerations at the top of the wind towers. This talk focuses on three connected issues of structural and mechanical vibrations in a wind turbine and their impact on the operational reliability and power generation. First of all, the operational reliability of a wind turbine is discussed based on a structural dynamic model of the wind tower/rotor blade system. Wind-induced acceleration fragility curves for typical wind turbines are developed with relevance to acceleration sensitive sub-components, such as generators, brakes, yaw systems, inverters, mechanical controls, electrical controls, hydraulic systems, gearboxes, shafts, and physical/electrical connections to the power grid. Results are presented for two cases: Western Texas, USA , and Northern Ireland. The use of fragility curves and risk of unavailability for wind turbines will continue to grow because the trend for future systems favors larger, more flexible, more massive, and more complex wind turbine units. With this in view the second part of the talk will present some structural dynamic instabilities (misinterpreted as aerodynamic by researchers) due to tower-blade coupling. It will be shown how the onset of the instabilities are affected by structural dynamic design parameters and damping. Finally, some semi-active vibration control strategies based on time-frequency analysis will be presented for suppression of instabilities/vibrations.

This talk is part of the COMMSP Seminar series.

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