High-strength bolts are widely used in wind turbines and play a significant role in their operation. In this paper, in order to study the ultimate strength of high-strength bolts in the connection between the hub and main shaft in a 2.5 MW wind turbine with pretension effects, two kinds of finite element models are presented: a solid bolt model and a simplified bolt model. Theoretical calculation was used to compare these models with the results of finite element methods. The ultimate strength analysis results showed that the simplified bolt model was the most efficient and useful in terms of computational time and memory usage. Based on this study, the simplified bolt model was used in the fatigue calculation considering multiple random fatigue loads, and the fatigue life of high-strength bolts was determined by combining the S–N curve of the bolt, based on the Palmgren–Miner Linear damage accumulation hypothesis.

This paper studies the dynamics of a two-stage gear transmission system in both the normal state and the fault state with tooth breakage. The torsional vibration model of the two-stage parallel shaft gear was developed by using the lumped parameter method. The time-varying meshing stiffness of the gear transmission system is described by Fourier series which is determined by the periodical meshing characteristics of the gears with both the single-tooth and the double-tooth contacts. By introducing the pulse into the regular time-varying meshing stiffness, the tooth breakage existing in the gear transmission system is mimicked. Based on the numerical simulation of the developed dynamic model, both the time domain analysis and the frequency domain analysis of the gear transmission system under both the normal condition and the tooth breakage are compared accordingly. The influence of the tooth breakage on the dynamic characteristics of the gear transmission system is analyzed comprehensively. Furthermore, based on the developed test bench of a two-stage gear transmission system, the experimental research was carried out, and the experimental results show great agreements with the results of numerical simulation, and thus the validity of the developed mathematical model is demonstrated. By comparing the periodic motion with the chaotic motion, the fault identification for the gear transmission system is verified to be tightly related to its vibration condition, and the control of the vibration condition of the gear transmission system as periodic motion is of great significance to the fault diagnosis.

Because wind power is connected to the grid on a large scale, frequency fluctuation in the power grid, which is defined as a system safety risk to the power grid, occurs from time to time. According to the grid code rules of China, wind turbines are required to be equipped with primary frequency modulation or inertia response control capability, which are used to support the safe and stable operation of the power grid. During the traditional frequency modulation process of the wind turbine, power limiting operation or pitch angle reservation is generally adopted to ensure that the reserved energy can be released at any time to support the frequency change in the power grid. However, the frequency support method leads to a large loss of power generation, and does not consider the coordination between mechanical load characteristics control and primary frequency modulation. In this paper, a mechanical load optimization control strategy for a wind turbine during the primary frequency modulation process, based on LIDAR (light detection and ranging) feed forward control technology, is proposed and verified. Through LIDAR feed forward control, the characteristics of incoming wind speed can be sensed in advance, with the consequence that the wind turbine can participate in, and actively control, the primary frequency modulation procedure. According to the characteristics of incoming wind, for instance the amplitude and turbulence, simultaneously, the size of the reserved pitch angle can be adjusted in real time. This kind of method, coordinating with the mechanical load of the wind turbine, can be used to reduce both the ultimate load and fatigue damage as much as possible. Finally, the mechanical load characteristics of the wind turbine with and without the control strategy are compared and studied through simulation. The research results show that the load optimization control strategy based on LIDAR feed-forward control technology can effectively reduce the fatigue and ultimate loads of the wind turbine while supporting the frequency change in the power grid; especially for the fatigue load of tower base tilt and roll bending moments, the reducing proportion will be about 4.3% and 6.3%, respectively.

Compound faults are common in wind turbine gearbox due to complex structure and harsh operating condition, which are represented by the bearing-gear fault and gear-gear fault etc . It is a challenging task to accurately detect multiple faults from on-site vibration signal potentially contaminated by intensive background noise. To address this issue, a multi-periodicity induced sparse-fidelity representation model is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on the periodicity-induced overlapping group shrinkage (POGS) model with the constraint of the sparsity within and across groups (SWAG). The l_p -norm and proposed reweighted minimax-concave penalty function with adjustable order are adopted for SWAG constraints. The hanning sequence is utilized as the periodicity-induced sequence in the POGS model. The closed-form solution of the proposed method is deduced using the majorization minimization algorithm. Eventually, a weighted strategy for the decomposed results is inferred to prevent over-decomposition issue. The proposed method is validated by simulation signals, experimental signal and on-site signal of actual wind turbine, which indicate that the characteristics of compound fault can be extracted plainly and the energy-loss is reduced effectively.

In a riser-drill string coupling system, the drill string extends from platform to downhole, and its exterior tube is divided by mud line into two parts: riser for upside and borehole for downside. Due to such a pipe-in-pipe structure, an improved dynamic model is proposed to take the multipoint interactions between the inner and outer pipes into consideration. The dynamic responses of this system are analyzed by Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) techniques; specifically, it is numerically simulated in Abaqus; then, both the parametric sensitivity analysis and the main effect analysis are carried out in Isight to determine the optimization parameters and the optimization strategy. Moreover, six-sigma algorithm in Isight is applied to simultaneously drive the neighborhood cultivation genetic algorithm (NCGA) to conduct multiobjective optimization and drive the Monte Carlo method to analyze the stability of the obtained optimal solution. Based on the above investigations, a software package is developed via the secondary developments of both Abaqus and Isight. By this way, the optimization design of the riser-drill string coupling system based on dynamic analysis can be conducted effectively and efficiently.