Extreme Design Loads Calibration of Offshore Wind Turbine Blades through Real Time Measurements

Blade Root flap and Edge moments are measured on the blades of a 3.6MW offshore wind turbine in normal operation. Ten minute maxima of the measurements are sampled to determine the extreme blade root flap moment, edge moment and resultant moment over six month duration. A random subset of the measurements over a week is taken as input to stochastic load extrapolation whereby the one year extrapolated design extreme is obtained, which are then compared with the maximum extremes obtained from direct measurements over a six month period to validate the magnification in the load levels for the blade root flap moment, edge moment obtained by extrapolation. The validation yields valuable information on prescribing the slope of the local extrapolation curve at each mean wind speed. As an alternative to determining the contemporaneous loads for each primary extrapolated load, the blade root resultant moment is extrapolated. This is found to possess smaller scaling factors in measurements over six months as compared to both the flap and edge moments, indicating that the contemporaneous load component of an extrapolated load should possess much smaller magnitude than its maxima.