Performance enhancement of wind turbine systems with vibration control: A review

Renewable energy becomes an asset to the world's energy resource for its eco-friendly and low cost energy production feature. As an important renewable energy source, wind turbine technology has become a significant contributor to the world energy production because of its feasible production cost, reliability and efficiency. Researchers are very active to optimize the effectiveness of wind turbines which may lead to increase the productivity of this source of energy. Vibration in the wind turbine system affects the productivity and thus reduces efficiency. Vibration of a system cannot be destroyed but can be reduced or converted to energy using appropriate strategies. Vibration control system improves structural response of wind turbines and reliability which has impact on lifetime of the components. Lowering the vibration amplitude of a system will provide a lesser amount of noise, assure user and operating comport, maintain the high performance and production efficiency. These will assist the system to prolong the lifetime of an industrial structure or machinery. Also vibration control enhances the performance of wind turbines providing suitable work environment without external disturbance. This paper presents an ample review on performance enhancement of the wind turbines by vibration mitigation. The aim of this review is to provide a concise point for researchers to assess the current trend to control vibration of wind turbines technology. This paper will focus on main vibration control techniques of wind turbine structures. It provides the applications of passive, active and semi active and vibration control strategies for structures, especially for wind turbines. Besides, this paper reviews on damping devices needed for vibration mitigation of structures. These damping devices have been implemented extensively in wind turbines for increasing their efficiency by mitigating vibration. This paper also reviews and assesses the performance of different control policies to control the system input and power input of damping devices. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.