Analysis of aeroelastic loads and their contributions to fatigue damage

The paper presents an analysis of the aeroelastic loads on a wind turbine in normal operation. The characteristic of the loads causing the highest fatigue damage are identified, so to provide indications to the development of active load alleviation systems for smart-rotor applications. Fatigue analysis is performed using rain-flow counting and Palmgren-Miner linear damage assumption; the contribution to life-time fatigue damage from deterministic load variations is quantified, as well as the contributions from operation at different mean wind speeds. A method is proposed to retrieve an estimation of the load frequencies yielding the highest fatigue contributions from the bending moment spectra. The results are in good agreement with rain-flow counting analysis on filtered time series, and, for the blade loads, show dominant contributions from frequencies close to the rotational one; negligible fatigue contributions are reported for loads with frequencies above 2 Hz.