Hybrid damper with stroke amplification for damping of offshore wind turbines

The magnitude of tower vibrations of offshore wind turbines is a key design driver for the feasibility of the monopile support structure. A novel control concept for the damping of these tower vibrations is proposed, where viscous-type hybrid dampers are installed at the bottom of the wind turbine tower. The proposed hybrid damper consists of a passive viscous dashpot placed in series with a load cell and an active actuator. By integrated force feedback control of the actuator motion, the associated displacement amplitude over the viscous damper can be increased compared with the passive viscous case, hereby significantly increasing the feasibility of viscous dampers acting at the bottom of the wind turbine tower. To avoid drift in the actuator displacement, a filtered time integration of the measured force signal is introduced. Numerical examples demonstrate that the filtered time integration control leads to performance similar to that of passive viscous damping and substantial amplification of the damper deformation without actuator drift. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.