The compact design of modern wind farms means that turbines are located in the wake over a certain amount of time. This leads to reduced power and increased loads on the turbine in the wake. Currently, research has been dedicated to reduce or avoid these effects. One approach is wake-steering, where a yaw misalignment is introduced in the upstream wind turbine. Due to the intentional misalignment of upstream turbines, their wake flow can be forced around the downstream turbines, thus increasing park energy output. Such a control scheme reduces the turbulence seen by the downstream turbine but introduces additional load variation to the turbine that is misaligned. Within the scope of this investigation, a generic multi body simulation model is simulated for various yaw misalignments. The time series of the calculated loads are combined with the wind speed distribution of a reference site over 20 years to investigate the effects of yaw misalignments on the turbines main bearing loads. It is shown that damage equivalent loads increase with yaw misalignment within the range considered. Especially the vertical in-plane force, bending and tilt moment acting on the main bearing are sensitive to yaw misalignments. Furthermore, it is found that the change of load due to yaw misalignments is not symmetrical. The results of this investigation are a primary step and can be further combined with distributions of yaw misalignments for a study regarding specific load distributions and load cycles.

Abstract. With the increasing demand for greener, sustainable, and economical energy sources, wind energy has proven to be a potential sustainable source of energy. The trend development of wind turbines tends to increase rotor diameter and tower height to capture more energy. The bigger, lighter, and more flexible structure is more sensitive to smaller excitations. To make sure that the dynamic behavior of the wind turbine structure will not influence the stability of the system and to further optimize the structure, a fully detailed analysis of the entire wind turbine structure is crucial. Since the fatigue and the excitation of the structure are highly depending on the aerodynamic forces, it is important to take blade–tower interactions into consideration in the design of large-scale wind turbines. In this work, an aeroelastic model that describes the interaction between the blade and the tower of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) is presented. The high-fidelity fluid–structure interaction (FSI) model is developed by coupling a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver with a finite element (FE) solver to investigate the response of a multi-megawatt wind turbine structure. The results of the computational simulation showed that the dynamic response of the tower is highly dependent on the rotor azimuthal position. Furthermore, rotation of the blades in front of the tower causes not only aerodynamic forces on the blades but also a sudden reduction in the rotor aerodynamic torque by 2.3 % three times per revolution.

To address the acoustic behaviour of wind turbines, particularly tonalities, in an early design stage, accurate simulation toolchains have to be developed. In this work a novel simulation approach for the prediction of tonalities of direct drive wind turbines is presented. Comprehensive work is carried out in the fields of electromagnetic force excitation, structural sound transfer and radiation as well as airborne sound propagation. The developed methods are combined to a simulation toolchain to formulate a multi-physical system model of a direct drive wind turbine in order to predict tonal sound behaviour. These methods will be presented and discussed in detail in the course of this work. First, the approach, integrating the electromagnetic airgap forces of the large generator into a multi body simulation model of the mechanical turbine, is explained and validated with test bench measurements. Following, the modeling of the respective mbs is presented which calculates the resulting surface velocities. This model is solved in the time domain to account for the interaction between the external loads that are highly nonlinear and low-frequency and the high-frequency excitation forces of the generator. Subsequently, the methods for calculating the airborne sound emission in the vincinity of the turbine resulting from the surface velocities are discussed.

This paper introduces a novel electromechanical model for calculating electromagnetic excited structural vibrations and structure borne acoustics for gearless wind turbines. Therefore, the wind turbine model structure is explained and a drivetrain model is derived to investigate the drivetrain decoupled from the aerodynamic excitations. The drivetrain model is fed with results from an electromagnetic finite element model of the generator considering air gap width changes and the wind turbine torque and speed characteristics. Furthermore, an exemplary ramp-up of the drivetrain is simulated. It can be seen, that generator structure oscillations are excited during certain rotational speeds, which may be relevant for the acoustic behavior of the turbine.

In this publication, the methods will be presented that are deployed to formulate a multi-physical system model of a direct drive wind turbine in order to calculate structure borne sound. The model includes excitation effect as well as sound radiating behaviour. The mechanical structure as a medium partner between excitation and radiation will be formulated through a multi-body simulation model in the time domain. In the multi-body simulation model, all relevant drivetrain components are considered with their structural eigenmodes in the frequency range of interest. The electromagnetic forces of the multi-pole ring generator are calculated and introduced into the mechanical structure at each stator tooth, rotor pole and various axial positions individually. Similarly, the modelling of the bearings is investigated for a range of available methods. Sound emission is evaluated at the large outer surface structures like tower, blades and nacelle cover. To minimize computational effort, the surface accelerations are not calculated for each surface node, instead a modal approach is used. Through a combination of mode shapes with mode participation factors of the respective structures, the surface accelerations can be regained during a post-processing step. Those results are used as input for airborne sound calculations. Nevertheless, the high number of modal and spatial degrees of freedom results in high computing costs.