Wind Turbine Lifetime Control Using Structural Health Monitoring and Prognosis

摘要

In wind energy operation and maintenance costs significantly contribute to the overall cost. This paper proposes a novel adaptive lifetime control approach for wind turbines to reduce operation and maintenance costs. The approach is based on a cascade structure with the outer loop utilizing structural health monitoring and prognosis techniques to determine suitable controller parameters and reference values of the inner loop. The trade-off between power production and load reduction is balanced to achieve predefined service lifetime using the knowledge of current system state-of-health and predicted future damage accumulation behavior. Unscheduled downtime is avoided by guaranteeing the predefined lifetime, hence reducing the maintenance cost. Simulation results using a reference wind turbine model show that the proposed control strategy can regulate the lifetime or the accumulated damage to the desired value with a reasonable sacrifice in harvested power.