Open Access
4P operational harmonic and blade vibration in wind turbines: a real case study of an active yaw system and a concrete tower
(Elsevier, 2024) Torres Elizondo, Antonio; Gil Soto, Javier; Plaza Puértolas, Aitor; Aginaga García, Jokin; Ingeniería; Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
This study aims to comprehensively investigate the impact of mechanical loads on the performance and lifetime of wind turbines, with particular emphasis on blade vibration at the 4P operational harmonic. Experiments and advanced aeroelastic simulations are combined to assess how active yaw systems and concrete towers affect this specific vibration. Contrary to previous assumptions, field tests have shown that there is a resonance phenomenon in the blade. Specifically, the first edgewise mode of the blade resonates at the 4P frequency, which did not happen in the aeroelastic simulations. Remarkably, thorough aeroelastic simulations show that this resonance is triggered by the excitation of the Edgewise Backward Whirling mode of the rotor, which occurs at the 3P operating harmonic. This study highlights the need for accurate and precise modelling using aeroelastic simulations to reproduce the resonance phenomenon and analyse the contributing factors. A major breakthrough is the discovery that stiffening the active yaw system significantly reduces the 3P hub fixed motions, resulting in reduced blade vibration at the 4P frequency. Furthermore, the simulations show the sensitivity of the 4P vibration to different wind characteristics, providing valuable insights for the design of wind turbines in different environmental conditions.
Embargo
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.
Open 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.
Open Access
Instantaneous amplitude and phase signal modeling for harmonic removal in wind turbines
(Elsevier, 2023) Zivanovic, Miroslav; Plaza Puértolas, Aitor; Iriarte Goñi, Xabier; Carlosena García, Alfonso; Ingeniería; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniaritza; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua, 0011-1365-2021-000159.
We present a novel approach to harmonic disturbance removal in single-channel wind turbine acceleration data by means of time-variant signal modeling. Harmonics are conceived as a set of quasi-stationary sinusoids whose instantaneous amplitude and phase vary slowly and continuously in a short-time analysis frame. These non-stationarities in the harmonics are modeled by low-degree time polynomials whose coefficients capture the instantaneous dynamics of the corresponding waveforms. The model is linear-in-parameters and is straightforwardly estimated by the linear least-squares algorithm. Estimates from contiguous analysis frames are further combined in the overlap-add fashion in order to yield overall harmonic disturbance waveform and its removal from the data. The algorithm performance analysis, in terms of input parameter sensitivity and comparison against three state-of-the-art methods, has been carried out with synthetic signals. Further model validation has been accomplished through real-world signals and stabilization diagrams, which are a standard tool for determining modal parameters in many time-domain modal identification algorithms. The results show that the proposed method exhibits a robust performance particularly when only the average rotational speed is known, as is often the case for stand-alone sensors which typically carry out data pre-processing for structural health monitoring. Moreover, for real-world analysis scenarios, we show that the proposed method delivers consistent vibration mode parameter estimates, which can straightforwardly be used for structural health monitoring.

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