Loading system and control strategy for simulating wind turbine loads

Abstract

A novel loading control system is proposed to accurately simulate the five-degree-of-freedom loads experienced by a real wind turbine. For this system, the real wind rotor and blades are replaced by an equivalent rotating disc and driven by an electric motor. A set of loading actuators are uniformly placed around this disc and are regulated to accurately create these turbine loads. In this paper, the five-degree-of-freedom turbine loads are defined in blade and hub reference frames. A load-decomposition based loading control strategy is presented to decompose such loads into reference loading forces for each actuator. An axial loading actuator is used for system modeling and analysis. Experimental results have validated that the proposed loading system and control strategy can accurately simulate the representative turbine loads with a good confidence level.