Stability Analysis of a Variable-Speed Wind Turbine

This paper examines the elastomechanical stability of a four-bladed wind turbine over a specific rotor speed range. Stability modes, frequencies, and dampings are extracted using a specialized modal processor developed at NREL that post-processes the response data generated by the ADAMS1 simulation code. The processor can analyze a turbine with an arbitrary number of rotor blades and offers anovel capability of isolating stability modes that become locked at a single frequency. Results indicate that over a certain rotor speed range, the tower lateral mode and the rotor regressive in-plane mode coalesce, resulting in a self-excited instability. Additional results show the effect of tower and nacelle parameters on the stability boundaries.