Model-Based Load Estimation for Wind Turbine Blade with Kalman Filter

For lifetime extension of a wind turbine, it is necessary to evaluate a remaining useful lifetime (RUL). Load monitoring is important for an accurate evaluation of RUL. In this study, we propose a load monitoring method for a wind turbine blade. In the proposed method, a static load acting on the blade is estimated using measurement data from a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and a resulting blade dynamic response is estimated with Kalman filter using strain measurements at the blade root as observations for it. The moment on the blade is calculated from the estimated dynamic response. We apply this method to Hitachi 2MW wind turbine. A numerical simulation is employed to validate the proposed method. As a result, it is shown that the moment estimated by the proposed method are consistent with true value calculated by the numerical simulation with sufficient accuracy for structural health monitoring.