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Vibration control is an essential component of safe and sustained operation of modern large wind turbine towers. As the blade-tower assembly offers time-dependent system matrices that periodically evolves with the rotational speed of the turbine, control theories (e.g. linear quadratic Gaussian) can not be directly adopted in this case. With this in view, the present study aims to develop a semi-active strategy using multiple magneto-rheological tuned liquid column dampers (MR-TLCDs) to mitigate excessive vibration of the horizontal axis wind turbine towers. The design of the controller is achieved by the multi-blade coordinate transformation that converts the system matrices into a non-rotating framework followed by time averaging to enable the application of linear control law. Parameters of the non-linear MR-TLCDs are optimally tuned to dissipate maximum energy. Aerodynamic loads are evaluated using modified blade element momentum theory. The performance of the proposed control strategy is assessed against different wind speeds. Clipping laws are employed to keep the semi-active control force in the feasible range. Two different clipping laws are compared in this paper. Finally, sensitivity analysis is carried out to demonstrate the performance envelope and robustness of the proposed controller. • Semi-active control of wind turbine tower using multiple MR-TLCDs. • Response characterization using blade-tower interaction. • Aerodynamic load estimation using BEM theory and rotationally sampled spectra. • Optimal control force estimation in LQG/LTR framework using MBC transformation. • Sensitivity analysis using actual large scale wind turbine parameters is carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Present study aims to address the design of smart vibration control scheme for horizontal axis wind turbine tower using magneto‐rheological tuned liquid column damper. With this in view, a reduced order model of the blade‐tower system is used, considering centrifugal stiffening and gravitational effects that lead to time‐dependent dynamic stiffness matrix. Aerodynamic load on the blades is modeled using blade element momentum theory. Semiactive control law in linear quadratic regulator framework is developed to mitigate the along‐wind vibration of the tower. To implement the control law, multiblade coordinate transformation is adopted that converts the system matrices in the nonrotating framework to tackle its time dependency. The performance of the proposed control algorithm is demonstrated using numerical simulations with and without controller. Clipped optimality of the control force is imposed to keep the parameters of magneto‐rheological tuned liquid column damper in the feasible range. Finally, sensitivity analysis is carried out to demonstrate the performance envelope of the proposed control algorithm for different operational scenario. Results presented in this paper clearly demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be employed for effective along‐wind vibration control of large HWAT tower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]