Simultaneous out-of-plane and in-plane vibration mitigations of offshore monopile wind turbines by tuned mass dampers

To effectively extract the vast wind resource, offshore wind turbines are designed with large rotor and slender tower, which makes them vulnerable to external vibration sources such as wind and wave loads. Substantial research efforts have been devoted to mitigate the unwanted vibrations of offshore wind turbines to ensure their serviceability and safety in the normal working condition. However, most previous studies investigated the vibration control of wind turbines in one direction only, i.e., either the out-of-plane or in-plane direction. In reality, wind turbines inevitably vibrate in both directions when they are subjected to the external excitations. The studies on both the in-plane and out-of-plane vibration control of wind turbines are, however, scarce. In the present study, the NREL 5 MW wind turbine is taken as an example, a detailed three-dimensional (3D) Finite Element (FE) model of the wind turbine is developed in ABAQUS. To simultaneously control the in-plane and out-of-plane vibrations induced by the combined wind and wave loads, another carefully designed (i.e., tuned) spring and dashpot are added to the perpendicular direction of each Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) system that is used to control the vibrations of the tower and blades in one particular direction. With this simple modification, a bi-directional TMD system is formed and the vibrations in both the out-of-plane and in-plane directions are simultaneously suppressed. To examine the control effectiveness, the responses of the wind turbine without control, with separate TMD system and the proposed bi-directional TMD system are calculated and compared. Numerical results show that the bi-directional TMD system can simultaneously control the out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations of the wind turbine without changing too much of the conventional design of the control system. The bi-directional control system therefore could be a cost-effective solution to mitigate the bi-directional vibrations of offshore wind turbines.