To ensure a high operational reliability of offshore wind turbines (OWEC) with economically acceptable repair and maintenance efforts, comprehensive diagnosis and supervision concepts are required. Automatic monitoring Systems will be an essential part of such concepts. Because of the fact, that during Operation there will be static and dynamic interaction between the components ‘structure’, ‘machinery’ and ‘blades’ it is necessary to develop the monitoring techniques in an overall concept. These monitoring Systems are supposed to be applied for the design and testing as well as for the Operation and maintenance phases. The knowledge of the dynamic behavior of wind turbines is important both for the design and for a safe Operation. The available monitoring data from a period of three years, allow first conclusions on the long-term Operation of such Systems in terms of quality requirements to the instrumentation to the structure and the rotor blades
The second part of these companion papers mainly researches environmental/operational influences on structural dynamic properties under normal operational conditions during two years, in order to extract a statistical based damage-sensitive indicator for health monitoring of a wind turbine system.
The correlation analyses between experimental identified frequencies, damping values as well as mode shapes and environmental/operational factors such as rotation speed of blades, wind speed, pitch angle, temperature and nacelle direction are presented. It is observed that the frequency estimates are influenced by the nacelle position, the activation of rotor, the rotation speed of blades and the wind speed as well as the temperature. Regarding to the damping estimates, they are mainly associated with variation of the aerodynamic damping due to the increasing wind speed. Besides, the resonance phenomenon is also observed in higher modes. The harmonic frequencies due to blades passing by tower are found and the corresponding damping value decreases. Moreover, the mode shapes in some modes are strongly affected by the position of the nacelle.
Subsequently, two types of simulated damage including the reduction of stiffness in both the rotor blade and the tubular tower are successfully detected by applying the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based methods to these temperature-sensitive frequency estimates. Comparison of change of the extracted health features indicates that they are more sensitive with the tower damage.