Browsing by Author "Ju, Dayuan"

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    Modeling of a Wind Turbine Rotor-Blade System and its Applications
    (2017) Ju, Dayuan; Sun, Qiao; Pieper, Jeff; Wood, David; Kuo, Arthur; Xi, FengFeng
    In order for wind energy to become a viable replacement for fossil fuels, recent years have seen an intense effort to address wind turbine efficiency and cost. A significant amount of attention has been placed on innovative blade design, advanced control strategies, and cost reduction, for example by minimizing turbine downtime through preventative maintenance. An accurate model can help in turbine system design, validation, performance evaluation, and optimization. It can also become an integral part of model-based control and model-based machine health condition monitoring solutions. This thesis develops a dynamics model for a rotor blade system in horizontal axis wind turbines. Although there exists the well-known FAST model, its great advantage of being general purpose also poses great limitations. For example, it does not enable root cause analysis in machine health monitoring solutions. This thesis proposes to improve model accuracy by including additional coupling terms. Our model was validated against FAST while suppressing the coupling terms. By including the fine details of the coupling between the rotor gross motion and the blade elastic deformation, blade vibration as a result of load distribution or blade health condition can be observed from rotor behavior with much greater sensitivity. With the proposed model, we designed an observer in order to estimate the wind speed from the rotor-blade dynamics response, which will help improve wind turbine performance. We have also demonstrated the use of our model to investigate the relation between rotor-blade motion and the generator behavior. The result is helpful in developing effective techniques for detecting faulty blades from generator signals.