A fatigue approach to wind turbine control

Abstract

Conventional design of wind turbine controllers is focused on speed and produced electric power. As fatigue loads is an important design consideration, the resulting design is evaluated also with respect to the fatigue loads inflicted on the turbine structure. This is normally done by performing simulations using tools like FLEX, HAWC or FAST, followed by rainflow counting in the resulting time series. This procedure constitutes an iterative design procedure involving realisations of the stress processes in order to obtain the time series needed for fatigue estimates. The focus of this paper is the elimination of the need for process realisation. To this end, known techniques for approximative fatigue load assesment based on the spectral moments of the inflicted stress histories are applied. Assuming a linearised system model, we present a novel scheme for efficient computation of these spectral moments. The scheme is applied to obtain rapid evaluation of cost functions including fatigue loads, hereby allowing efficient numerical optimisation of the controller. Three different controller design examples are given, all defined directly in terms of component life times. © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd.