Investigation on vibration control performance of wind turbine tower using a prestressed tuned mass damper under seismic excitations

With the rapid development and wide application of large megawatts wind turbine, the service operation environment of WTT (wind turbine tower) has been more and more complex. In particularly, the seismic excitation can easily give a rise to the excessive vibration for WTT. Not only it will loss the efficiency of generation energy, but also shortens the fatigue life of the wind turbine. In order to effectively alleviate the adverse vibration of WTT structure under seismic excitation, a novel passive vibration control device named PS-TMD (prestressed tuned mass damper) is employed to investigate the vibration control performance in this paper. Firstly, the mathematical model was established based on the structural dynamics theory, and the mathematical analytical expression of dynamic coefficient was deduced. Then, the parameters design method was obtained by the system tuning optimization theory under the seismic excitation. Furthermore, based on the theoretical analysis and parameter design, the numerical example results of 3.4MW WTT showed that the PS-TMD could effectively mitigate the resonance response under the harmonic basal acceleration. Finally, the ANSYS time-history analysis method was employed to verify the rationality and effectiveness of PS-TMD device, the results indicated that this device could notably reduce the dynamic responses of WTT induced by the fundamental frequency response. Additionally, the PS-TMD would not produce the nonlinearity effect induced by large rotation angle, and it had the anticipated competence of distortion performance and dissipating hysteretic energy under the seismic excitation. © 2022 Editorial Office of China Civil Engineering Journal. All rights reserved.