Research on Integrated Control Strategy for Wind Turbine Blade Life

Abstract

Wind turbine blades bear the maximum cyclic load and varying self-weights in turbulent wind environments, which accelerate the propagation of cracks that ultimately progress from minor faults, resulting in blade failure and significant maintenance and shutdown costs. To address this issue, this paper proposes an adaptive control strategy for the blade’s useful life. The control system is divided into the inner control loop and the outer control loop. The outer loop is based on the Paris crack propagation model combined with a particle filtering algorithm and calculates the degradation of the blade life under the crack threshold conditions provided by the operation and maintenance strategy to determine the parameter settings of the inner-loop load-shedding controller. The control strategy we propose can balance the load-shedding capability of the controller with the fatigue load of the pitch actuator while considering the predefined remaining useful blade life in the operation and maintenance strategy, avoiding unplanned downtime and reducing maintenance costs.