Reducing tower fatigue through blade back twist and active pitch-to-stall control strategy for a semi-submersible floating offshore wind turbine

Abstract

The necessity of producing more electricity from renewable sources has been driven predominantly by the need to prevent irreversible climate chance. Currently, industry is looking towards floating offshore wind turbine solutions to form part of their future renewable portfolio. However, wind turbine loads are often increased when mounted on a floating rather than fixed platform. Negative damping must also be avoided to prevent tower oscillations. By presenting a turbine actively pitching-to-stall, the impact on the tower fore–aft bending moment of a blade with back twist towards feather as it approaches the tip was explored, utilizing the time domain FAST v8 simulation tool. The turbine was coupled to a floating semisubmersible platform, as this type of floater suffers from increased fore–aft oscillations of the tower, and therefore could benefit from this alternative control approach. Correlation between the responses of the blade’s flapwise bending moment and the tower base’s fore–aft moment was observed with this back-twisted pitch-to-stall blade. Negative damping was also avoided by utilizing a pitch-to-stall control strategy. At 13 and 18 m/s mean turbulent winds, a 20% and 5.8% increase in the tower axial fatigue life was achieved, respectively. Overall, it was shown that the proposed approach seems to be effective in diminishing detrimental oscillations of the power output and in enhancing the tower axial fatigue life.