scholarly journals Reducing Tower Fatigue through Blade Back Twist and Active Pitch-to-Stall Control Strategy for a Semi-Submersible Floating Offshore Wind Turbine

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 1897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Ward ◽  
Maurizio Collu ◽  
Joy Sumner

The necessity of producing more electricity from renewable sources has been driven predominantly by the need to prevent irreversible climate chance. Currently, industry is looking towards floating offshore wind turbine solutions to form part of their future renewable portfolio. However, wind turbine loads are often increased when mounted on a floating rather than fixed platform. Negative damping must also be avoided to prevent tower oscillations. By presenting a turbine actively pitching-to-stall, the impact on the tower fore–aft bending moment of a blade with back twist towards feather as it approaches the tip was explored, utilizing the time domain FAST v8 simulation tool. The turbine was coupled to a floating semisubmersible platform, as this type of floater suffers from increased fore–aft oscillations of the tower, and therefore could benefit from this alternative control approach. Correlation between the responses of the blade’s flapwise bending moment and the tower base’s fore–aft moment was observed with this back-twisted pitch-to-stall blade. Negative damping was also avoided by utilizing a pitch-to-stall control strategy. At 13 and 18 m/s mean turbulent winds, a 20% and 5.8% increase in the tower axial fatigue life was achieved, respectively. Overall, it was shown that the proposed approach seems to be effective in diminishing detrimental oscillations of the power output and in enhancing the tower axial fatigue life.

2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Ward ◽  
Maurizio Collu ◽  
Joy Sumner

Abstract For a turbine mounted on a floating platform, extreme induced loads can be increased by up to 1.6 times those experienced by a turbine situated on a fixed base. If these loads cannot be reduced, towers must be strengthened which will result in increased costs and weight. These tower loads would be additionally exasperated for a pitch-to-feather controlled turbine by a phenomenon generally referred to as “negative damping,” if it were not avoided. Preventing negative damping from occurring on a pitch-to-feather controlled floating platform negatively affects rotor speed control and regulated power performance. However, minimizing the blade bending moment response can result in a reduction in the tower fore-aft moment response, which can increase the tower life. A variable-speed, variable pitch-to-stall (VSVP-S) floating semi-submersible wind turbine, which does not suffer from the negative damping and hence provides a more regulated power output, is presented. This incorporates a back twist blade profile such that the blade twist, starting at the root, initially twists toward stall and, at some pre-determined “initiation” point, changes direction to twist back toward feather until the tip. Wind frequency weighting was applied to the tower axial fatigue life trends of different blade profiles and a preferred blade back twist profile was identified. This had a back twist angle of −3 deg and started at 87.5% along the blade length and achieved a 5.1% increase in the tower fatigue life.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Pustina ◽  
Claudio Pasquali ◽  
Jacopo Serafini ◽  
Claudio Lugni ◽  
Massimo Gennaretti

Abstract Among the renewable energy technologies, offshore wind energy is expected to provide a significant contribution for the achievement of the European Renewable Energy (RE) targets for the next future. In this framework, the increase of generated power combined with the alleviation of vibratory loads achieved by application of suitable advanced control systems can lead to a beneficial LCOE (Levelized Cost Of Energy) reduction. This paper defines a control strategy for increasing floating offshore wind turbine lifetime through the reduction of vibratory blade and hub loads. To this purpose a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller based on measured blade-root bending moment feedback provides the blade cyclic pitch to be actuated. The proportional and integral gain matrices are determined by an optimization procedure whose objective is the alleviation of the vibratory loads due to a wind distributed linearly on the rotor disc. This control synthesis process relies on a linear, state-space, reduced-order model of the floating offshore wind turbine derived from aero-hydroelastic simulations provided by the open-source tool OpenFAST. In addition to the validation of the proposed controller, the numerical investigation based on OpenFAST predictions examines also the corresponding control effort, influence on platform dynamics and expected blade lifetime extension. The outcomes show that, as a by-product of the alleviation of the vibratory out-of-plane bending moment at the blade root, significant reductions of both cumulative blade lifetime damage and sway and roll platform motion are achieved, as well. The maximum required control power is less than 1% of the generated power.


Author(s):  
Jiajia Yang ◽  
Erming He ◽  
Juncheng Shu

Floating offshore wind turbine is a complex rigid-flexible coupling nonlinear system, and the accurate dynamic model is difficultly established. Therefore, the wind-wave interference cannot be improved by adopting the conventional control strategy. In order to solve this problem, an adaptive fuzzy controller (AFC) is used to suppress the dynamic response of floating wind turbine. Two correction factors are introduced to optimize the fuzzy rule, and the traditional fuzzy controller (FC) is firstly obtained. Since the balance positions change and structural parameter perturbation of the wind turbine, an AFC is designed and validated. Finally, the suppression vibration responses ability of floating offshore wind turbine by using the different control strategies is studied under the random wind-wave disturbance and blade pitch control system coupling effect. The simulation results show that the tracking ability of the AFC to the target value is obviously higher than that of the FC; Comparing with the passive control strategy, the suppression vibration effect on the power spectral density (PSD) of the platform pitch (PFPI) motion peak can increase by 39.06% by adopting the AFC.


Author(s):  
Junbae Kim ◽  
Hyeonjeong Ahn ◽  
Byoungcheon Seo ◽  
Hyunkyoung Shin

The initial design of a 12-MW floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) was made by the University of Ulsan (UOU) based on the 5-MW offshore wind turbine of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using the law of similarity. The tower design was checked through the eigenfrequency and fatigue strength analysis according to the GL guideline of tower design conditions. The direct expansion of the 5 MW wind turbine support structure caused a resonance problem of the tower of the 12-MW UOU FOWT and the tower length was adjusted to avoid the 3P resonance. Wind turbines are required to have a design life of more than 20 years and shall be designed to endure both ultimate and fatigue loads experienced during the design life. The platform pitch motion of FOWTs due to combined wave and wind loading may result severely in both fore-aft forces and moments at the base of the tower. In this study, we used the simplified fatigue analysis, which is generally applied when considering safety margins by stress to predict the fatigue life of tower. In order to calculate the fatigue load, the Markov matrix was constructed by using the cycle counting method to determine range, average value, and cycle number of loads from peak and valley values of actual load histories simulated by FAST v8 of the tower base. The predicted fatigue life at the tower base was follow by S/N curves for welded steel structures and it was calculated by the Palmgren-Miner’s rule.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 2519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim ◽  
Kwon

In the present study, a numerical framework for predicting the aerodynamic performance and the aeroelastic behavior of floating offshore wind turbine rotor blades involving platform motion was developed. For this purpose, the aerodynamic and structural analyses were conducted simultaneously in a tightly coupled manner by exchanging the information about the aerodynamic loads and the elastic blade deformations at every time step. The elastic behavior of the turbine rotor blades was described by adopting a structural model based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam. The aerodynamic loads by the rotor blades were evaluated by adopting a blade element momentum theory. The numerical simulations were conducted when the platform of the wind turbine independently moves in each of the six degrees-of-freedom directions consisting of heave, sway, surge, roll, pitch, and yaw. It was observed that flexible blades exhibit complicated vibratory behaviors when they are excited by the aerodynamic, inertia, and gravitational forces simultaneously. It was found that the load variation caused by the platform surge or pitch motion has a significant influence on the flapwise and torsional deformations of the rotor blades. The torsional deformation mainly occurs in the nose-down direction, and results in a reduction of the aerodynamic loads. It was also found that the flapwise root bending moment is mainly influenced by the platform surge and pitch motions. On the other hand, the edgewise bending moment is mostly dictated by the gravitational force, but is not affected much by the platform motion.


Author(s):  
Hiroki Shiohara ◽  
Rodolfo T. Gonçalves ◽  
Hidetaka Houtani ◽  
Hideyuki Suzuki ◽  
Anja Schnepf ◽  
...  

Abstract A floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) concept with a guy wire-supported tower was investigated to obtain results of motion in waves considering its elastic model characteristics. The FOWT concept aims to reduce construction costs by using a light-weight structure tensioned with guy wires and a downwind turbine concept type. A wave tank experiment of an elastically similar segmented backbone model in the 1/60th scale was conducted to clarify the dynamic elastic response features of the structure. The results were compared with numerical simulations obtained with software NK-UTWind (in house software developed by the University of Tokyo) and WAMIT code. It was clarified that the bending moment for tower and pontoons had two peak values when the response for each wave period was examined. The peak in the short-wave period was due to sagging when the wavelength matched the floater length. The other peak was due to the largest tower top acceleration, which caused a large bending moment at the tower base and pontoon to support the inertia force.


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