Monitoring of wind turbine blades for flutter instability

Classical flutter of wind turbine blades indicates a type of aeroelastic instability with fully attached boundary layer where a torsional blade mode couples to a flapwise bending mode, resulting in a mutual rapid growth of the amplitudes. In this paper the monitoring problem of onset of flutter is investigated from a detection point of view. The criterion is stated in terms of the exceeding of a defined envelope process of a specific maximum torsional vibration threshold. At a certain instant of time, a limited part of the previously measured torsional vibration signal at the tip of blade is decomposed through the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method, and the 1st Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) is assumed to represent the response in the flutter mode. Next, an envelope time series of the indicated modal response is obtained in terms of a Hilbert transform. Finally, a flutter onset criterion is proposed, based on the indicated envelope process. The proposed online flutter monitoring method provided a practical and direct way to detect onset of flutter during operation. The algorithm has been illustrated by a 907-DOFs aeroelastic model for wind turbines, where the tower and the drive train is modelled by 7 DOFs, and each blade by means of 50 3-D Bernoulli-Euler beam elements.