Structural monitoring and smart control of a wind turbine

The remarkable growth in height of wind turbines in the last years - for a higher production of electricity - makes the issues of monitoring and control of such challenging engineering works pressing than ever. The research herein proposed is addressed to monitor the structural demand imposed to the tower as well as to bound it within given limits thanks to the presence and automatic remote control of smart devices at the base of the tower. The latter are magnetorheological (MR) dampers, i.e. special dissipative devices able to change, almost in real time, their mechanical behaviour according to the intensity of current feeding them. A specific control algorithm is proposed to drive MR dampers during severe wind loads. It aims to instantaneously calibrate the current to be supplied to the MR dampers, i.e. their “stiffness”, so as to reduce stresses and displacements imposed to the wind tower.