A Methodology for Robust Load Reduction in Wind Turbine Blades Using Flow Control Devices

Abhineet Gupta, Mario A. Rotea, Mayank Chetan, Mohammad S. Sakib and D. Todd Griffith
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Abhineet Gupta: Center for Wind Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
Mario A. Rotea: Center for Wind Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
Mayank Chetan: Center for Wind Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
Mohammad S. Sakib: Center for Wind Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
D. Todd Griffith: Center for Wind Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-29

Abstract: Decades of wind turbine research, development and installation have demonstrated reductions in levelized cost of energy (LCOE) resulting from turbines with larger rotor diameters and increased hub heights. Further reductions in LCOE by up-scaling turbine size can be challenged by practical limitations such as the square-cube law: where the power scales with the square of the blade length and the added mass scales with the volume (the cube). Active blade load control can disrupt this trend, allowing longer blades with less mass. This paper presents the details of the development of a robust load control system to reduce blade fatigue loads. The control system, which we coined sectional lift control or SLC, uses a lift actuator model to emulate an active flow control device. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) Methodology for SLC design to reduce dynamic blade root moments in a neighborhood of the rotor angular frequency (1P). (2) Analysis and numerical evidence supporting the use of a single robust SLC for all wind speeds, without the need for scheduling on wind speed or readily available measurements such as collective pitch or generator angular speed. (3) Intuition and numerical evidence to demonstrate that the SLC and the turbine controller do not interact. (4) Evaluation of the SLC using a full suite of fatigue and turbine performance metrics.

Keywords: wind turbine technology; load control; robust control; active flow control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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