Effect of Shut-Down Procedures on the Dynamic Responses of a Spar-Type Floating Wind Turbine

The design standards (IEC, DNV and GL) define a minimum set of combinations of external conditions and design situations as load cases. Like other design load conditions, the design situations relating to fault and shut-down events shall be addressed. Emergency shut down occurs in the presence of severe faults to prevent turbine damage. For pitch-regulated turbines, blade pitching to feather provides an effective means of aerodynamic braking. The blades are pitched to feather at the maximum pitch rate. This action exerts huge loading on the turbine and may challenge the structural safety. In this paper a 5-MW spar-type wind turbine is used as a case study. By using the HAWC2 code, the turbine pitch actuator fault and shut-down scenarios are simulated through external Dynamic Link Libraries. The shut-down scenarios are: normal shut down with blade pitching, emergency shut down with blade pitching, and emergency shut down with blade pitching and mechanical brake. Due to the occurrence of fault, the pitch angle of one blade is fixed from a specific occurrence time. The supervisory controller reacts by pitching the remaining two blades to the maximum pitch set. The maximum yaw motion value is observed after the first revolution of the rotor during which the tower-top torsion experiences a change of direction. Negative platform pitch motion as well as tower-bottom bending moment are induced due to the pitching activity of the two blades. The response extremes of the main shaft bending moment and the yaw motion exhibit clear variation with the blade azimuth when emergency shut down is initiated. The tower-bottom bending moment and nacelle acceleration are relatively more affected by the wave loads. For a given blade azimuth, larger response variation is observed under harsher environmental conditions. Under the fault scenario, the effects of different shut-down procedures on the response extremes are investigated. It is found that the response extremes are affected significantly by the rotor speed. Among the three procedures, normal shut down, which is associated with the slowest decaying aerodynamic excitations and the highest rotor speed, usually leads to the largest response extremes near the rated wind speed. The employment of mechanical brake reduces rotor speed, motion responses and structural responses effectively. During shut down, the responses of yaw motion, nacelle fore-aft acceleration, main shaft bending moment, and tower-bottom side-to-side moment may be of concern for the floating wind turbine studied.