Dynamic displacement measurement of a wind turbine tower using accelerometers

tilt error compensation and validation

authored by: Clemens Jonscher, Paula Helming, David Märtins, Andreas Fischer, David Bonilla, Benedikt Hofmeister, Tanja Grießmann, Raimund Rolfes
Abstract: For vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) of wind turbine support structures, accelerometers are often used. Besides the structural acceleration, the measured quantity also contains the acceleration component due to gravity, which is known as tilt error. This tilt error must be quantified and taken into account; otherwise it can lead to incorrect evaluations, especially in the fatigue estimation or the dynamic displacement estimation using accelerometers. The standard solution is to explicitly measure the tilt angle, which requires an additional sensor for each measurement point and is not applicable for already recorded measurements without tilt information. Therefore, a novel tilt error compensation method is presented by using the static bending line. As a result the influence of the tilt error can be estimated in advance, and no additional sensors for tilt measurement are needed. The compensation method is applied to accelerometer measurements of an onshore wind turbine tower and validated with contactless absolute distance measurements from a terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) system. The position and frequency-dependent tilt error of the investigated tower has a significant influence on the quasi-static motion below 0.2 Hz with a minimum amplitude error of 9 %, whereas the normalised bending mode shapes around 0.3 Hz are only slightly affected.
Organisation(s): Institute of Structural Analysis
CRC 1463: Integrated Design and Operation Methodology for Offshore Megastructures
External Organisation(s): University of Bremen
Type: Article
Journal: Wind Energy Science
Volume: 10
Pages: 193-205
No. of pages: 13
ISSN: 2366-7443
Publication date: 22.01.2025
Publication status: Published
Peer reviewed: Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Energy Engineering and Power Technology
Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-10-193-2025 (Access: Open)