Smart optimized structural control of onshore wind turbines with MR dampers

Abstract

This paper presents an effective control approach for structural vibration of onshore wind turbines in the edgewise direction. Huge multi mega-watt wind turbines are currently developed to harvest large amounts of energy from the wind. Such designs require the construction of huge slender blades and towers which consequently lead to undesirable structural deformations that hinder the power production and reduce life span of the wind turbine. Many researchers have worked on structural control of wind turbines. However, these efforts neither have resulted in an effective reliable mitigation for deformation of structural elements, nor they have achieved an economical solution in terms of actuators exploitation. The work presented in this paper, however, introduces a particle swarm optimisation-based semi-active controller which exploits magnetorheological dampers to mitigate edgewise blade displacements. Dampers are modelled using neural networks for they are capable of predicting future forces and eliminating control lag. The developed controller is tested at several configurations of actuators placement on a benchmark 5-MW wind turbine. The proposed approach, indeed, showed a significant reduction of over 80% in the peak responses and about 77% of peak-to-peak response of blades against uncontrolled and passive systems which leads to promoting longevity of wind turbines.