Aeroelastic Stability Analysis of a Quad-Rotor Wind Turbine

This paper presents the aeroelastic stability analysis of a quad-rotor wind turbine and identifies modes with low damping that are otherwise not present on a single-rotor wind turbine. The non-linear dynamics of a wind turbine model in SIMPACK, without considering wind shear and tower shadow, is linearized around a steady-state; followed by MBC transformation resulting in LTI model. Standard eigenvalue analysis of LTI model is carried out to capture the natural frequency and damping of a quad-rotor wind turbine as a function of wind speed. Results show that several modes with low damping (besides the low damping modes observed on a single-rotor wind turbines) are identified where the damping ratio is less than 1% over the entire operation range.