Wind Turbine Lifetime Control Using Structural Health Monitoring and Prognosis
M. Hung, Dirk Söffker
Abstract
In wind energy operation and maintenance costs significantly contribute to the overall cost. This paper proposes a novel adaptive lifetime control approach for wind turbines to reduce operation and maintenance costs. The approach is based on a cascade structure with the outer loop utilizing structural health monitoring and prognosis techniques to determine suitable controller parameters and reference values of the inner loop. The trade-off between power production and load reduction is balanced to achieve predefined service lifetime using the knowledge of current system state-of-health and predicted future damage accumulation behavior. Unscheduled downtime is avoided by guaranteeing the predefined lifetime, hence reducing the maintenance cost. Simulation results using a reference wind turbine model show that the proposed control strategy can regulate the lifetime or the accumulated damage to the desired value with a reasonable sacrifice in harvested power.