Extreme coherent gusts with direction change – probabilistic model, yaw control, and wind turbine loads

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Abstract. Observations of large coherent fluctuations are used to define a probabilistic model of coherent gusts with direction change. The gust model provides the joint description of the gust rise time, amplitude, and directional changes with a 50-year return period. The observed events are from a decade of measurements from a coastal site in western Denmark, making the derived gust model site specific. In conjunction with the gust model, a yaw controller is presented in this study to investigate the load implications of the joint gust variables. These loads are compared with the design load case of the extreme coherent gust with direction change (ECD) from the IEC 61400-1 Ed.4 wind turbine safety standard. Within the framework of our site-specific gust model we find the return period of the ECD to be approximately 460 years. From the simulations we find that for gusts with a relatively long rise time the blade root flapwise bending moment, for example, can be reduced by including the considered yaw controller. From the extreme load comparison of the ECD and the modeled gusts we see that by including the variability in the gust parameters the load values from the modeled gusts are between 20 % and 74 % higher than the IEC gusts.