Adaptive tower damping control for offshore wind turbines

This paper deals with the problem of wind turbine tower damping control design and implementation in situations where the support structure parameters vary from their nominal design values. Such situations can, in practice, occur for onshore and especially offshore wind turbines and are attributed to aging, turbine installation, scour or marine sand dunes phenomena and biofouling. Practical experience of wind turbine manufacturing industry has shown that such effects are most easily quantified in terms of the first natural frequency of the turbine support structure. The paper brings forward a study regarding the amount to which nominal tower damping controller performance is affected by changes in the turbine natural frequency. Subsequently, an adaptive tower damping control loop is designed using linear parameter-varying control synthesis; the proposed tower damping controller depends on this varying parameter which is assumed throughout the study to be readily available. An investigation of the fatigue load reduction performance in comparison with the original tower damping control approach is given for a generic three-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbine. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.