Distribution of extreme gust loads of wind turbines

Extreme gust loading of wind turbines has been treated deterministically as prescribed in the design codes, without taking into account the stochastic property of the wind turbulence. In this paper a rational approach to quantify the variability of the gust loading of a wind turbine is presented and a new approach on the simulation of the extreme gusts with constrained simulations is proposed. The results from simulations with deterministic gusts and stochastic gusts are compared. The distribution of the extreme response due to extreme gust is derived using the constrained gust approach. The influence on response of a spatial gust and a point gust is studied. The effect of the gust centre on the turbine response has also been taken into account. The response distribution at a certain mean wind speed is determined with full-scale time domain simulation and compared to the distribution derived with constrained gusts. The method is demonstrated using the turbine model of a prototype wind turbine; for this reason the result is preliminary and generalization should be made with care. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.