Two methods for estimating aeroelastic damping of operational wind turbine modes from experiments

The theory and results of two experimental methods for estimating the modal damping of a wind turbine during operation are presented. Estimations of the aeroelastic damping of the operational turbine modes (including the effects of the aerodynamic forces) give a quantitative view of the stability characteristics of the turbine. In the first method the estimation of modal damping is based on the assumption that a turbine mode can be excited by a harmonic force at its natural frequency, whereby the decaying response after the end of excitation gives an estimate of the damping. Simulations and experiments show that turbine vibrations related to the first two tower bending modes can be excited by blade pitch and generator torque variations. However, the excited turbine vibrations are not pure modal vibrations and the estimated damping is therefore not the actual modal damping. The second method is based on stochastic subspace identification, where a linear model of the turbine is estimated alone from measured response signals by assuming that the ambient excitation from turbulence is random in time and space. Although the assumption is not satisfied, this operational modal analysis method can handle the deterministic excitation, and the modal frequencies and damping of the first tower and first edgewise whirling modes are extracted. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.