The use of wind power is in a period of rapid growth worldwide and wind energy systems have emerged as a promising technology for utilizing offshore wind resources for the large scale generation of electricity. Drawing upon the maturity of wind turbine and floater technologies developed by the wind energy and oil and gas industries, respectively, large offshore wind energy systems have been dev...

The work presented in this paper has two major aspects: (i) investigation of a simple, yet efficient model of the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) 5-MW reference wind turbine; (ii) nonlinear control system development through a real-time nonlinear receding horizon control methodology with application to wind turbine control dynamics. In this paper, the results of our simple wind turb...

A circuit model is proposed in this paper for calculating the transient potential rise on the wind turbine struck by lightning. The model integrates the blade, sliding contact site, and tower and grounding system of the wind turbine into an equivalent circuit. The lightning current path from the attachment point to the ground can be fully described by the equivalent circuit. The transient poten...

There are many advantages of floating wind turbines in deep waters, however, there are also significant technological challenges associated with it too. The dynamic excitation of wind and waves will induce excessive motions along each of the 6 degrees of freedom (6-DOF) of the floating platforms. These motions will then be transferred to the turbine, and directly impact the turbines’ performanc...

Wind energy is a rapidly growing form of renewable energy in the United States. While summary information on the total amounts of installed capacity are available by state, a free, centralized, national, turbine-level, geospatial dataset useful for scientific research, land and resource management, and other uses did not exist. Available in multiple formats and in a web application, these publi...

A detailed review of the current state-of-art for wind turbine blade design is presented, including theoretical maximum efficiency, propulsion, practical efficiency, HAWT blade design, and blade loads. The review provides a complete picture of wind turbine blade design and shows the dominance of modern turbines almost exclusive use of horizontal axis rotors. The aerodynamic design principles fo...

This paper deals with the power generation control in variable speed wind turbines. In this context, a control strategy is proposed to ensure power extraction optimization of a DFIGbased wind turbine. The proposed control strategy combines an MPPT using a high gain observer and second-order sliding mode for the DFIG control. This strategy presents attractive features such as chattering-free beh...

Some large wind turbines use a synchronous generator directly-coupled to the turbine. This paper considers condition monitoring and diagnosis of mechanical and electrical faults in such a variable speed machine. The application of wavelet transforms is investigated because of the disadvantages of conventional spectral techniques in processing instantaneous turbine signals. In this paper a new c...

In a wind turbine system, blades are one of the most critical components. They capture energy from wind and convert it to a mechanical energy for electricity power generation. However, once the blades are defective, the power generation efficiency of the turbine will be significantly affected. In worse case when the blade is seriously damaged, the turbine will have to be shut down completely fo...