On Singular Perturbations of Flexible and Variable-Speed Wind Turbines

A model for the mechanical dynamics of a wind turbine is developed, which is the composition of three physical mechanisms: flexion, torsion, and rotational dynamics. A first contribution is the identification of the essential physical parameters that provide a time-scale separation of these three mechanisms. Under the assumption of singular perturbations the time-scale separation allows to work with a reduced model of order one. This reduction has been essential for the control of this system allowing to control designers to take into account only the reduced-order model. A second contribution consists in employing a measurement of the fore-aft nacelle acceleration with the reduced model, together with a Kalman filter to estimate the flexible DOFs of the system (tower and average blade deflection). The successful approach is tested on high-order nonlinear aeroelastic simulator (FAST).