Resonant vibration control of wind turbine blades

The paper deals with introduction of damping to specific vibration modes of wind turbine blades, using a resonant controller with acceleration feedback. The wind turbine blade is represented by three-dimensional, two-node finite elements in a local, rotating frame of reference. The element formulation accounts for arbitrary mass density distributions, general elastic crosssection properties and geometric stiffness effects due to internal stresses. A compact, linear formulation for aerodynamic forces with associated stiffness and damping terms is established and added to the structural model. The efficiency of the resonant controller is demonstrated for a representative turbine blade exposed to turbulent wind loading. It is found that the present explicit tuning procedure yields close to optimal tuning, with very limited modal spill-over and effective reduction of the vibration amplitudes.