Equipment response spectra for wind turbines considering the baseline control system

Abstract

As more and more wind turbines are installed in areas with high seismic intensity, various published works have studied the seismic performance of wind turbines. However, these studies usually focus on the wind turbine, and less attention is paid to the electrical equipment mounted on the wind turbine. Electrical equipment is a non-structural component on wind turbine, which is prone to failure and damage, resulting in the loss of function of the wind turbine. Therefore, it is necessary to study the seismic performance of the electrical equipment installed on the wind turbine. This study focuses on evaluating and quantifying the dependence of equipment spectrum accelerations on the location of the electrical equipment in the structure, the damping ratio of the equipment, and the baseline control system. The baseline control system is used to control the output power by adjusting the rotor speed and the blade pitch angle, which affects the equipment spectrum of the wind turbines. There is a stronger relationship between the equipment response spectrum and the peak floor acceleration. Therefore, the equipment spectral amplification function is calculated as the ratio of the equipment spectral acceleration to the peak floor acceleration for different height. The equipment spectra amplification function is proposed and validated to estimate peak acceleration demands on the design of electrical equipment placed on wind turbines. The results indicate that current seismic code provisions will not always provide an adequate characterization of equipment accelerations. And the effect of wind turbine baseline control and equipment damping is more pronounced in the range of the structural tuning period than in the non-tuning range.