Smart fatigue load control on a large-scale wind turbine based on different sensing strategies

This paper presented a numerical study on the smart fatigue load control of a large-scale wind turbine blade. Three typical control strategies, with sensing signals from flapwise acceleration, root moment and tip deflection of the blade, respectively, were mainly investigated on our newly developed aero-servo-elastic platform. It was observed that the smart control greatly modified in-phased flow-blade interaction into an anti-phased one at primary 1P mode, significantly enhancing the damping of the fluid-structure system and subsequently contributing to effectively attenuated fatigue loads on the blade, drive-chain components and tower. The aero-elastic physics behind the strategy based on the flapwise root moment, with stronger dominant load information and higher signal-to-noise ratio, was more drastic, and thus outperformed the other two strategies, leading to the maximum reduction percentages of the fatigue load within a range of 12.0 ∼22.5%, in contrast to the collective pitch control method. The finding pointed to a crucial role the sensing signal played in the smart blade control. In addition, the performances within region III were much better than those within region II, exhibiting the benefit of the smart rotor control since most of the fatigue damage was believed to be accumulated beyond the rated wind speed.