Project: FREE YAW

Report created by Moh on 9/21/2020

Document Report
Selected documents (5)

75 EvS_PhDthesis_w_cover
PDF document, 96 quotations
Comment: by Moh
-yaw drives can be greatly reduced by using yaw-by-IPC. This means that IPC is used to create
periodic individual blade pitch setpoints such that an aerodynamic moment around the tower can
be created. This aerodynamic moment causes the rotor-nacelle assembly to rotate accordingly
and, hence, can be used to face the rotor in the wind.
- A downwind damped free-yaw wind turbine offers several possibilities for wind di- rection
tracking. A downwind free-yaw confguration will naturally track the wind with some misalignment
and variations around an equilibrium yaw angle depending on the wind speed. The equilibrium
yaw angle is the angle where the 1P blade tends to be min- imal (Hansen, 1992) and, hence, in
below-rated operating conditions not the maximum amount of energy will be extracted from the
wind. In order to improve wind turbine tracking and thereby electrical power output in below-
rated winds, one could use yaw- by-IPC. That is, by individually pitching the blades over a rotor
revolution, a yawing moment can be generated that aligns the rotor-nacelle assembly with the
wind.
- Downwind rotor confguration: The rotor-nacelle assembly of the wind turbine has a downwind
confguration. This means that one of the design driving properties of a wind turbine becomes less
critical. That is, the tower clearance plays a larger role in an upwind confguration than in a
downwind confguration. The blades can therefore also designed to be more fexible thereby saving
material.
- Damped free-yaw system: The novel downwind rotor confguration in combination with the
damped free-yaw system of the 2B6 also brings several advantages. To start off with, a recently
published study by Stubkier et al. (2013) claims that the use of a soft-yaw system1 reduces the
tower fatigue loads by 40% and ultimate loads by 19%, and even more in case an overload
protection system in the hy- draulic yaw system is introduced. Secondly, a free-yaw wind turbine
can also have a positive impact on the extracted power from the wind, because it offers the
possibility of continuous wind direction tracking. Furthermore, yaw misalign- ments for load
reduction (Kragh and Hansen, 2014) can easily be incorporated and, in the context of wind farms,
a free yaw wind turbine with yaw-by-IPC could be used for wake redirection and thereby
increasing the total wind farm power output (Gebraad et al., 2014). On the other hand, a
challenge for a damped free- yaw rotor-nacelle assembly comes from gyroscopic effects. Although
the rotor is damped in the yaw rotation, changes in the wind (direction) can cause the yaw rates to
increase and thereby also the turbine loads. Moreover, the mass of inertia of a two-bladed rotor is
dependent on the rotor position, which causes higher loads on the yaw system (Hau, 2006;
Schorbach and Dalhoff, 2012).
 -Individual Pitch Control (IPC): The wind turbine uses IPC for load control. For a two- bladed
wind turbine without a teetered hinge, IPC can be used to compensate cyclic shaft bending
moments as stated in Bossanyi et al. (2013) through 1P blade load control.
4.5.1. COMPARISON OF RIGID YAW AND FREE YAW:
Various yaw system types exist for wind turbines. Conventionally, most wind turbines feature an
upwind rigid yaw confguration with yaw control provided by yaw drives. If a certain yaw
misalignment threshold is exceeded, the yaw brakes are released and the yaw drives are enabled
to align the rotor-nacelle assembly with the current wind direction.
On the other hand, a free yaw confguration in a downwind fashion naturally tracks the wind. The
consequence of such a free yaw turbine is that wind direction changes may cause high yaw rates
and thereby gyroscopic loads. To overcome the latter, the yaw rates can be decreased by making
use of a yaw system providing yaw damping. Additionally, with the use of IPC, the wind direction
can be actively tracked.
Before comparing the different yaw controllers discussed in Section 4.4, frst the dif- ferences
between a rigid yaw and a free yaw confguration are analyzed. To this end, four different
confgurations are considered:
Rigid yaw: With this yaw confguration, the rotor-nacelle assembly is rigidly connected to the
tower.
Free yaw: In this case, the rotor-nacelle assembly is free to rotate (except for yaw fric- tion).
Damped free-yaw: In this case, the rotor-nacelle assembly is free to rotate on the tower (except for
yaw friction), however damping is provided by the yaw system to limit the yaw rate. Yaw damping
value III is selected for the comparison.
Free yaw with yaw-by-IPC: The same as the free-yaw confguration, however, extended with yaw-
by-IPC to actively track the wind direction.
Damped free-yaw with yaw-by-IPC: The same as the damped free-yaw confguration, however,
extended with yaw-by-IPC to actively track the wind direction.
Page 92 gives a complete analysis about the effect of different yaws configurATIONS ON THE
LOADS ON WIND TURBINES.
iN TERMS OF POWER THE FOLLOWING IS DERIVED IN PAGE 93:
It can be observed that the free yaw and damped free-yaw confgurations without yaw-by-IPC
produced slightly less energy. The yaw confgurations with yaw-by-IPC produce roughly the same
amount as the rigid yaw confguration. Moreover, from a study by Kragh and Hansen (2015), it
was concluded that with improved yaw misalignment a theoretical 0.2% annual energy production
in- crease could be obtained compared to an (undisclosed) yaw control strategy using yaw drives.
From these results and the study by Kragh and Hansen (2015), it is expected that no signifcant
power losses or gains will be achieved with the use of a fexible yaw con- fguration and yaw-by-
IPC.

77 Free_yaw_performance_of_the_Mod0_large_horizontal_
PDF document, 75 quotations
Comment: by Moh
The NASA Mod-0 Large Horizontal Axis 100 kW Wind Turbine was operated in free yaw with an
unconed teetered, downwind rotor mounted on a nacelle having 8-1/20 tilt.
It was found the nacelle stabilized in free yaw at a yaw angle of between -550 to -450,was
relatively independent of wind speed and was well damped to short term variations in wind
direction.
 MOSTAB calculations indicate that elimination of tilt and adding coning will improve wind
turbine alignment with the wind and that wind shear has a slight detrimental effect on the free yaw
alignment angle.
Free yaw of a wind turbine has been a goal of designers for some time because of the
attractiveness of eliminating the yaw drive.

106 Qualitative yaw stability analysis of free-yawing

PDF document, 72 quotations
Comment: by Moh
*This paper investigates the effect of different parameters on yaw stability of passive yawing
downwinf turbine:
Tilt angle- cone angle- flap flexibility and shaft length.
*Increase in rotor size and blade flexilbility promoted the reuse of downwind concept.
The downwind concept potentially comes with the option of a passive yaw alignment.
* the study focuses on studyng the effect of parameters on equilibrium yaw angle, and the dynamic
stability of free-yaw mode.
* in this study BEM is used for aerodynamic prediction.
*"Eggleston, D. M. and Stoddard, F. S.: Yaw Stability, in: Wind Tur- bine Engineering Design,
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc., New York, USA, 205–211, 1987." developed a simple yaw
model to investigate the effect of cone, wind shear and turbulence, and wind speed on yaw
misalignement and restorative moments.
*YawDyn tool emphasized the importance of including dy- namic stall effects and a skewed infow
model in the predic- tion of yaw behaviour
They could further show the infuence of blade mass imbalances, tower shadow, rotor tilt, and hor-
izontal and vertical wind shear as the contribution to asym- metry of the rotor loading from
fapwise blade root bending moments. While the study showed that the yaw behaviour could be
simulated qualitatively, the tool was not able to cap- ture the quantitative yaw dynamics correctly
in all test cases.
*Pesmajoglou, S. D. and Graham, J. M. R.: Prediction of aerody- namic forces on horizontal and
axis wind turbines in free yaw and turbulence, J. Wind Eng. Ind. Aerod., 8
on the other hand, pre- dicted the yaw moment coeffcient for different-sized turbine models with a
free vortex lattice model.
their model could successfully predict the variation in the yaw moment coeffcient in a turbulent
wind feld.
* Verelst, D. R. and Larsen, T. J.: Yaw stability of a free-yawing 3- bladed and downwind wind
turbine,
They showed an increase in the restorative effect on the yaw moment from higher cone angles
because the cone angle increases the imbalance of the rotor forces and there- fore the restorative
yaw moment.
*Picot, N., Verelst, D. R., and Larsen, T. J.: Free yawing stall- controlled downwind wind turbine
with swept blades and coned rotor,
studied the effect of swept blades on a coned rotor on a 100 kW stall-regulated turbine. With
backward swept blades, the destabilizing effect of the stall was reduced, but occurred over a
larger wind range.
* Kress, C., Chokani, N., and Abhari, R.: Downwind wind turbine yaw stability and performance,
Renew. Energ
 compared the efeect of conning on the yaw in both upwind and downwind configurations.
conclusion:
It is shown that a full alignment with the wind direction is only achievable without tilt angle of the
turbine and inclination angle of the wind feld. It is shown that large cone angles increase the
alignment with the wind direction and the damping of the free-yaw mode.

120 Yaw of Horizontal Axis

PDF document, 66 quotations
Comment: by Moh
*
* the complexity of yaw behavior has, until recently, discouraged engineers from developing a
complete yaw analysis method.
* sis here is upon developing practical and sufficiently accurate design methods, lt was desired
that at the end of this research the wind turbine designer would be able to specify with confidence
the yaw configuration needed to achieve benign and acceptable yaw behavior.
*A design model named YawDyn is now available for use in free-yaw and fixed-yaw analysis, lt
has been shown to be accurate in comparisons ,with test data and other analyses. However, the
model relies upon empirical methods which are not proven for the wide range of rotors and wind
conditions which can be conceived.
Swift 1981: build the starting point model. he included the dynamic inflow effect.
coclusions : page 68 of the report.
*This development is just one step in a long process of fully understanding yaw dynamics and
learning to design rotors which take advantage of yaw behavior instead of being punished by it.
Many extensions of this modelling technique are possible and needed. The most obvious are
addition of other degrees of freedom and improvement of the aerodynamics calculations.
* The aerodynamics analysis has been found to be of great importance in estimation of yaw loads.
YawDyn used simplistic representations of aerodynamic phenomena to determine whether those
phenomena may be important. Unfortunately, virtually ali the aerodynamic effects introduced did
play an important role. This means the model must be improved to more accurately account for
each of those effects (stall hysteresis, skewed wake corrections and static stall were ali important),
lt is known that delayed static stall occurs on rotor blades, though this effect is not modelled in
YawDyn. The Gormont dynamic stall model depends too heavily upon empiricism to be suitable
for design of rotors with new airfoils. Thus it is important that new techniques, perhaps borrowed
from the helicopter industry, be employed in the wind turbine codes.
Dynamic inflow is not modeled (except in a quasi-steady form). The importance of the skewed
wake corrections implies that dynamic inflow corrections will also be significant. Implementing
these physical phenomena in codes which will be understood and used by designers is a major
challenge to the wind industry.

63 Control design for a two-bladed downwind teeterless damped free-yaw

wind turbine
PDF document, 61 quotations