Extreme Gust Loading for Wind Turbines during Operation

Abstract

One of the extreme load cases treated in the wind turbine certification is the extreme gust loading during operation. In the certification codes, it is treated in a deterministic way. A method of generating stochastic extreme gusts that includes the turbulence properties of the wind is described in this paper. For the moment, only the horizontal along wind direction of the wind speed is considered. The stochastic gusts are used to determine the gust responses. The gust responses are processed together with the probability density of the gust amplitude and mean wind speed to obtain the gust response distribution. Different distribution types, namely Rayleigh, Weibull, and Gumbel distributions, are applied to fit the distribution of the extreme gust responses. The estimated distributions are analyzed with statistical methods to determine the required number of simulations to obtain a reliable estimate of the statistical parameters of the distribution. The resulting structural responses to the stochastic gusts are compared to the gust response to the extreme operating gust specified in the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) design standard. The results show that the extreme gust response can differ significantly depending on the control concept. The response of the deterministic gust proposed in the IEC design code can also deviate considerably from the response of the stochastic gust depending on the turbine configuration. The aim of this work is to provide a rational approach to determine the extreme gust response. This theoretical method has not yet been verified with extensive measurements.