Application of OMA to an Operating Wind Turbine: now including Vibration Data from the Blades

The presented study continues the work on application of Output Only Modal Analysis (OMA) to operating wind turbines. It is known from previous studies that issues like the time-varying nature of the equations of motion of an operating wind turbine (in particular the significant harmonic components due to the rotor rotation) as well as the considerable aerodynamic damping make OMA of operating wind turbines a difficult task. While in the previous works OMA was based on data provided by sensors mounted on the wind turbine tower and nacelle, we here attempt to improve the results by instrumenting the blades as well. It is believed that the availability of vibration data from the blades will improve the observability of the main global vibration modes (especially the heavily damped out-of-plane modes), and thus will assure a better estimation of modal parameters, especially the damping. The paper discusses the technical challenges regarding blade instrumentation and data acquisition, data processing applied to eliminate the time-varying nature of an operating wind turbine in the resulting eigenvalue problem and, finally, it presents and discusses the initial results.