Engineering Structures 56 (2013) 954–957

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Engineering Structures
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/engstruct

The vibration analysis of wind turbine blade–cabin–tower coupling

system
W.Y. Liu a,b,⇑
a
School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou 221116, PR China
b
Great Lakes Energy Institute, Case Western Reserve University, OH 44106, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Renewable energy sources especially wind energy have gained much attention due to the recent energy
Received 21 March 2013 crisis and the urge to obtain clean energy. To maintain the wind turbine in operation healthily, imple-
Revised 9 June 2013 mentation of condition monitoring system and fault detection system is necessary. In wind turbine con-
Accepted 11 June 2013
dition monitoring, vibration analysis is a common and affective way to apply in the feature extraction and
Available online 17 July 2013
fault diagnosis, especially in the rotation parts. The blade–cabin–tower coupling system is analyzed in
this paper. At first, the coordinate system and the kinetic equation are established. The tower natural fre-
Keywords:
quency is calculated based on the coordinate system and the random following wind vibration is ana-
Wind turbine
Blade–cabin–tower coupling system
lyzed. In the end, the total wind force in blade–cabin–tower coupling system is solved.
Vibration analysis Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

0. Introduction
Renewable energy sources like wind energy are copiously avail-
able without any limitation. Reliability of wind turbine is critical to
extract maximum amount of energy from the wind [1,2]. Wind
turbines have different types in size or capacity, on the whole
structure aspect they can be divided into two types: gearbox
speed-increase type and directly driven type. The directly driven
wind turbine does not contain speed-increase gearbox, its blades
are connected to the generator through the wheel hub. Most wind
turbines have upwind rotors that are actively yawed to preserve
alignment with wind direction. The three-bladed rotor is the most
popular and, typically, has a separate front bearing with a low
speed shaft connected to a gearbox which provides an output
speed suitable for a four-pole generator [3]. Fig. 1 shows the main
structure of a common speed-increase gearbox wind turbine [4].
As shown in Fig. 1, the wind turbine is consisted of several com-
ponents such as main bearing, gearbox, generator, wind meter,
control cabinet, and revolving motor. The main structure of the
wind turbine can be simplified as a blade–cabin–tower system
on the whole. To maintain the wind turbine in operation healthily,
implementation of condition monitoring system and fault detec-
tion system is important and for this purpose ample knowledge
of these two types of systems is mandatory [5].
In wind turbine condition monitoring, vibration analysis is a
common and effective way to be applied in the feature extraction
⇑ Corresponding author Address: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineer-
ing, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, 221116, PR China. Tel.: +1 216 482 6624.
E-mail address: wxl310@case.edu
and fault diagnosis, especially in the rotation parts [6–8]. When the
wind turbine is running, the blade–cabin–tower system is under
the non-stationary wind force and brings some non-stationary
and non-Gaussian vibration, which will affect the driving chain
especially the gearbox. Therefore, before the condition monitoring
processing of the wind turbine, it is necessary to analyze the vibra-
tion characteristic of the turbine structure, especially the blade–ca-
bin–tower system.
There is no paper deal with the whole wind turbine blade–ca-
bin–tower system before [9–11]. Some papers have established
the tower system or the cabin system separately. Some papers deal
with the blades under air turbulent flow and proposed some con-
clusions. The application of the non-ideal model to the gear rattling
dynamics has been presented in a recent paper [12–14]. However,
when combine the blade, cabin and tower together, the condition
is so complex and hard to establish the condition function, espe-
cially a non-ideal vibrating system when the excitation is influ-
enced by response of the system. A wind turbine tower with an
unbalanced non-ideal generator suffers the Sommerfeld effect of
getting stuck at resonance (energy imparted to the generator being
used to excite large amplitude motions of the supporting struc-
ture). There are few results on non-ideal vibrating systems in the
current literature. Based on the above analysis, this paper intro-
duced some parameters which can affect the vibration of the whole
wind turbine and analyzed the coupling vibration of the blade–ca-
bin–tower system.
The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 gives some
basic coordinate systems for simplification. Section 3 calculates
the kinetic equation of the wind turbine tower and gives some
results. The tower natural frequency is calculated in the 4th

0141-0296/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2013.06.008
 W.Y. Liu / Engineering Structures 56 (2013) 954–957 955

Tower coordinate system Rt(Otxtytzt). This system is fixed on the

tower intersecting surface and its origin point Ot is in the center
of joint face of cabin and tower, i.e., the tower top center. Its base
vector is [itcjtkt]T.
Cabin coordinate system Rn(Onxnynzn). This system is fixed on the
cabin and its origin point On is located on the cabin barycenter, and
zn is perpendicular to the intersecting surface of the tower top. Its
base vector is [injnkn]T.
Rotate coordinate system Rh(Ohxhyhzh). The origin of coordinate
Oh is located in the center of the blade-hub system. This system ro-
tates around yn axis in the cabin coordinate system, in the angular
velocity of X. Its base vector is [ihjhkh]T.

2. Kinetic equation of the tower

The tower kinetic equation is established in the inertial coordi-

Fig. 1. Main structure map of the wind turbine system. nate system R0(O0x0y0z0), and simplified as single degree of free-
dom (SDOF) system. This is the simplest idealized model and can
be expressed as:
section. Section 5 discusses the simple and complex situation
separately in order to analyze the random following wind vibra- ðtÞ þ C yðtÞ
My _ þ KyðtÞ ¼ PðtÞ ð1Þ
tion. Some conclusions are given in the last section.
where M is the mass matrix of the tower unit, C is the resistance
matrix, K is the stiffness matrix, y(t) is the displacement vector of
1. Establish the necessary coordinate system
tower, P(t) is the outside force.
Divided by M of the both side in Eq. (1), it can be changed into
The coordinate system is important in the structure vibration
standard form:
analysis. The suitable coordinate can simplify the analyze process
and reduce the calculation steps. Before the structure of the wind _ þ x21 yðtÞ ¼ FðtÞ
ðtÞ þ 2f1 x1 yðtÞ
y ð2Þ
turbine, it is necessary to establish some important coordinate sys- qffiffiffi
tems. According to the needs of the analysis and the structure of where x1 ¼ M K
; f1 ¼ 2pCffiffiffiffiffi ; FðtÞ ¼ PðtÞ .
KM M
the wind turbine, this paper established 4 main coordinate sys- Suppose the input force F(t) is replace by pulse signal
tems, as shown in Fig. 2. The wind turbine is simplified as a F(t)Dtd(t  s) with continuous distribution, where d(t  s) is the
R1
blade–cabin–tower system. Some other structures such as wind Dirac function and when t = s, d(t) = 1 and 1 dðtÞdt ¼ 1. Then
indicator, handrail, or other additional parts outside the cabin are the response under F(t)Dtd(t  s) is F(t)Dth(t  s). The whole re-
cut off in the analysis. sponse of the system under every pulse can be calculated as
As shown in Fig. 2, there are mainly 4 coordinate systems have
been established: X
t

Inertial coordinate system R0(O0x0y0z0). The origin of coordinate yðtÞ ¼ FðtÞDshðt  sÞds ð3Þ
s¼1
O0 is located in the center of the tower root, and the base vector
is [i0j0k0]T. When Ds ? ds,
Z 1
yðtÞ ¼ FðsÞhðt  sÞds ð4Þ
1

Generally, when t < 0, F(t) = 0, then

Z t
yðtÞ ¼ FðsÞhðt  sÞds ð5Þ
0

We can obtain the vibration function of the infinite degrees of

freedom
" # " #
@2y @2 @2y @2 @2y
mðzÞ þ C IðzÞ þ EIðzÞ ¼ pðz; tÞ ð6Þ
@t2 @t@z @z2 @z2 @z2

Suppose the displacement is divided under vibration mode as

X
1
yðz; tÞ ¼ qi ðtÞui ðzÞ ð7Þ
i¼1

Then the function of generalized coordinate qi(t) can be obtained

Pj ðtÞ
€j þ 2fj q_ j þ x2j qj ¼
q  F j ðtÞ ð8Þ
Mj
R R
Fig. 2. Coordinate system of the wind turbine kinetic equation. where Mj ¼ mðzÞu2j ðzÞdz; Pj ðtÞ ¼ pðz; tÞuj ðzÞdz.
956 W.Y. Liu / Engineering Structures 56 (2013) 954–957

natural frequency of the wind turbine tower structure can be de-

duced as
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
x K 1 3EJq
Fx ¼ ¼ ¼ ð16Þ
2p 2p 2p ðL  lÞl2 G

4. Random following wind vibration

In order to analysis conveniently, the wind turbine structure

can be simplified more, as shown in Fig. 4.
Its vibration function can be expressed as

@ 2 yðz; tÞ @yðz; tÞ
mðzÞ þ cðzÞ þ kðzÞyðz; tÞ  pðz; tÞ ¼ pðz; tÞf ðtÞ
@t 2 @t
Z t
¼ xðzÞf ðtÞds ð17Þ
0

Where, on the point z in the height direction per unit, m(z)is the
Fig. 3. Force analysis of the wind turbine tower. mass, c(z)is the damping coefficient, k(z)is the stiffness coefficient,
p(z)is the horizontal wind force, f(t)is the time function with maxi-
3. Tower natural frequency calculate mum value 1, x(z)is the wind force per unit area under displace-
ment coordinate system.Suppose the instant wind speed is V(z, t)
The force analysis of the turbine tower is shown in Fig. 3. Be- under the random height z, the average wind speed is VðzÞ, the fluc-
cause the tower is consisted of some thick steel tube, it can be sim- tuating wind speed is Vf(z, t), then there exist the relationship be-
plified as SDOF and its kinematic equation can be listed as tween these three parameters
2
d sðtÞ dsðtÞ
2
þ 2f þ K 2 sðtÞ ¼ FðtÞ ð9Þ Vðz; tÞ ¼ VðzÞ þ V f ðz; tÞ ð18Þ
dt dt
The instant wind pressure can be calculated as
where s(t) is the horizontal displacement, 2f dsðtÞ
dt
is the viscous fric-
tion force, f is the structure damping coefficient, K2s(t) is the elastic 1
force, K is the structure elastic coefficient, F(t) is the wind force. xðz; tÞ ¼ qlx ðzÞV 2 ðz; tÞ ð19Þ
2
The wind force can be simplified as stationary random process
with fixed force spectrum density GF(x). After the Fourier trans- V 2 ðz; tÞ ¼ V 2 ðzÞ þ 2VðzÞV f ðz; tÞ þ V 2f ðz; tÞ ð20Þ
form, Eq. (9) can be changed into
Z 1 2 Z 1 Z 1 where V2(z, t) and V 2 ðzÞ are second order trace that can be omitted,
d sðtÞ dsðtÞ ixt
2
eixt
dt þ 2f e dt þ K 2 sðtÞeixt
dt then
1 dt 1 dt 1
Z 1 xðz; tÞ ¼ x
 ðzÞ þ xj ðz; tÞ ð21Þ
¼ FðtÞeixt dt ð10Þ
1 where x  ðzÞ ¼ 12 qlx ðzÞV 2 ðzÞ, xj ðzÞ ¼ 12 qlx ðzÞV 2f ðz; tÞ, lx(z) is the
R1 R1
Suppose 1 sðtÞe dt ¼ SS ðxÞ and ixt
FðtÞe ixt
dt ¼ GF ðxÞ, the figure coefficient.
1
above equation can be simplified as In the engineering area, we only consider the effect of fist mode
of vibration when analyzing the cantilever structure object. Actu-
2
ðixÞ SS ðxÞ þ 2fðixÞSS ðxÞ þ K 2 SS ðxÞ ¼ GF ðxÞ ð11Þ ally, wind vibration is a vibration and the equivalent wind vibra-
Then tion force is the inertia force of the mode of vibration. Therefore,

GF ðwÞ
SS ð x Þ ¼ ð12Þ
K 2  x2 þ 2ifx
Define
1
LðmÞ ¼ 2
ð13Þ
K  x þ 2ifx 2

Then Eq. (13) is the transfer function form of the kinetic equation,
its solution is the spectral density of the stationary random process
s(t), as
 2
 1 
SS ðxÞ ¼  2  G F ð xÞ
 ð14Þ
K  x2 þ 2ifx
If we do not consider the friction force in the steel tube and the air,
we can obtain
G F ð xÞ
SS ð x Þ ¼ 2
ð15Þ
ðK 2  x2 Þ
Suppose the denominator of the transfer function L(m) is 0, the va-
lue of the response spectrum SS(x) will be infinite. Therefore, the Fig. 4. Sketch map of the tower system.
 W.Y. Liu / Engineering Structures 56 (2013) 954–957
the wind vibration force of the first mode of vibration can be calcu-
lated by
pd ðzÞ  pd1 ðzÞ ¼ f1 u1 u1 ðzÞmðzÞx0
Under impulse wind pressure, the wind vibration coefficient can be
defined as the ratio between probability statistics of the total wind
force ps(z) + pd(z) and the calm wind force ps(z).
ps ðzÞ þ pd ðzÞ p ðzÞ
bðzÞ ¼ ¼1þ d
ps ðzÞ ps ðzÞ
ps ðzÞ ¼ ls ðzÞlz ðzÞW 0 lx ðzÞ
where ls(z) is the height changing coefficient of the wind pressure,
lx(z) is the horizontal length of the tower in the windward side.
f1 u1 u1 ðzÞmðzÞx0
bðzÞ ¼ 1 þ ¼ 1 þ f1 u1 r 1
ls ðzÞlz ðzÞW 0 lx ðzÞ
u1 ðzÞmðzÞ
r 1 ðzÞ ¼
ls ðzÞlz ðzÞlx ðzÞ
where f1 is the dynamic coefficient of the wind vibration, u1 is the
influence coefficient when considering the wind pressure and space
relativity, r1 is the location coefficient.
Then the total wind force created by wind vibration force is
F ¼ bls lz W 0 A
This whole blade–cabin–tower coupling system simplified the wind
turbine and kept the main parameters in the analysis. The following
vibration analysis based on this result can be taken. The further re-
search work is to extract the fault features and identify the condi-
tion of the wind turbine. The in-depth research around the
vibration analysis and the experimental analysis should be the next
research focus.
5. Conclusion
In order to analyze the wind turbine blade–cabin–tower cou-
pling system, this paper established the coordinate system and
the kinetic equation of the system. The tower natural frequency
is calculated based on the coordinate system and the random wind
vibration is analyzed. In the end, the total wind force in blade–ca-
bin–tower coupling system is calculated. The following fault diag-
nosis based on the vibration analysis can be taken based on the
results.
957
Acknowledgments
ð22Þ This research was supported by the Scientific research support
project for teachers with doctor’s degree, Jiangsu normal univer-
sity, China (Grant No. 11XLR15). the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 51075347).
References
ð23Þ
[1] Liu Wenyi, Tang Baoping, Jiang Yonghua. Status and problems of wind turbine
structural health monitoring techniques in China. Renew Energy
ð24Þ 2010;35:1414–8.
[2] Villa Luisa F, Reñones Aníbal, Perán Jose R, de Miguel Luis J. Angular
resampling for vibration analysis in wind turbines under non-linear speed
fluctuation. Mech Syst Signal Process 2011;25:2157–68.
[3] Drewry MA, Georgiou GA. A review of NDT techniques for wind turbines. Wind
Turbine NDT 2007;49:137–41.
ð25Þ [4] Amirat Y, Benbouzid MEH, Al-Ahmar E, Bensaker B, Turri S. A brief status on
condition monitoring and fault diagnosis in wind energy conversion systems.
Renew Sust Energy Rev 2009;13:2629–36.
[5] Hameed Z, Hong YS, Cho YM, Ahn SH, Song CK. Condition monitoring and fault
ð26Þ detection of wind turbines and related algorithms: a review. Renew Sust
Energy Rev 2009;13:1–39.
[6] Hyers RW, McGowan JG, Sullivan KL, Manwell JF, Syrett BC. Condition
monitoring and prognosis of utility scale wind turbines. Energy Mater
2006;1:187–203.
[7] Tavner PJ, van Bussel GJW, Spinato F. Machine and converter reliabilities in
wind turbines. In: Proc. 3rd IET international conference on power electronics,
machines and drives; 2006. p. 127–30.
[8] Wilkinson MR, Spinato F, Tavner PJ. Condition monitoring of generators and
ð27Þ other subassemblies in wind turbine drive trains. In: IEEE international
symposium on diagnostics for electric machines, power electronics and drives;
2007. p. 388–92.
[9] Murtagh PJ, Basu B, Broderick BM. Along-wind response of a wind turbine
tower with blade coupling subjected to rotationally sampled wind loading. Eng
Struct 2005;27(8):1209–19.
[10] da Fonseca Brasil Reyolando Manoel Lopes Rabelo, Feitosa LCS, Balthazar José
Manoel. A nonlinear and non-ideal wind generator supporting structure. Appl
Mech Mater 2006;5–6:433–42;
da Fonseca Brasil Reyolando Manoel Lopes Rabelo, Feitosa LCS, Balthazar José
Manoel. A nonlinear and non-ideal wind generator supporting structure.
Meccanica (Milano) 2003;38:613–21.
[11] de Goeij WC, van Tooren MJL, Beukers A. Implementation of bending-torsion
coupling in the design of a wind-turbine rotor-blade. Appl Energy
1999;63(3):191–207.
[12] Bechly ME, Clausen PD. Structural design of a composite wind turbine blade
using finite element analysis. Comput Struct 1997;63(3):639–46.
[13] Kong C, Bang J, Sugiyama Y. Structural investigation of composite wind turbine
blade considering various load cases and fatigue life. Energy 2005;30(11–
12):2101–14.
[14] Balthazar José Manoel, Mook Dean T, Weber Hans Ingo, Brasil Reyolando
MLRF, Fenili A, Belato D, Felix JLP. An overview on non-ideal vibrations.
Meccanica 2003;38:613–21.