Plaza Puértolas, Aitor

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Plaza Puértolas

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Aitor

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Ingeniería

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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • PublicationEmbargo
    Main shaft instantaneous azimuth estimation for wind turbines
    (Elsevier, 2025-02-20) Zivanovic, Miroslav; Vilella San Martín, Iñigo; Iriarte Goñi, Xabier; Plaza Puértolas, Aitor; Gainza González, Gorka; Carlosena García, Alfonso; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoa eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritza; Ingeniería; Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua
    We present a novel approach to estimating the instantaneous main shaft angular position in the context of wind turbine structural health monitoring. We show that only two IMU channels - gyroscope axial and accelerometer tangential - contain enough information to build an acceleration state-space model that properly captures the rotational dynamics of a wind turbine. The kernel of the model is an in-phase and quadrature time-varying sinusoid whose argument is driven by the integral of the gyroscope output. This approach clearly stands in contrast to most state-of-the-art methods, where the gyroscope output is explicitly modeled. The model equation describes the states dynamics, which simultaneously assesses the instantaneous amplitude and initial phase of the angular displacement through a first-order autoregressive process. Such a state-space model features only two states per time instant; furthermore, it is linear-in-states and therefore straightforwardly estimated by the linear Kalman filter. It is shown that the instantaneous azimuth estimates obtained from the state-space model, linearly combined with the gyroscope output, effectively cancel out the long-term drift in the estimate. The benchmark results suggest that the proposed method outperforms a state-of-the-art method, in terms of robustness against noise and adaptability to changing operating regimes in a wind turbine.
  • PublicationOpen Access
    Triaxial accelerometer based azimuth estimator for horizontal axis wind turbines
    (Elsevier, 2023) Plaza Puértolas, Aitor; Ros Ganuza, Javier; Gainza González, Gorka; Fuentes Lárez, José David; Ingeniería; Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
    One of the elements that receives the greatest stresses is the main shaft. Its damage is directly related to the cyclical nature of its rotational motion. However, the vast majority of horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT) do not have sensors to measure the main-shaft angular position (azimuth), or they are not always easily accessible. Using a main-shaft placed single triaxial accelerometer for the estimation of the azimuth is proposed as a low intrusion approach that can be easily deployed in machines already in use. An approach using a tandem of two extended Kalman filters (calibration/prediction), aiming for a precise and robust estimation, is presented. The estimator is able to calibrate for accelerometer positional and orientation errors, as well as for bias drift. To simplify the burden of deployment, a simple procedure is proposed to determine the covariance matrices for a particular HAWT from those determined in a synthetic case. The proposed approach is analyzed using synthetic data, OpenFAST simulation of NREL-5MW HAWT. It outperforms the ATAN naive approach by an order of magnitude, showing errors smaller than 0.4o. The filter shows a good behavior, coherent with that of the synthetic setup, when tested on experimental data obtained from a 3MW HAWT.