Zili Zhang

As wind turbines increase in magnitude without a proportional increase in stiffness, the risk of dynamic instability is believed to increase. Wind turbines are time dependent systems due to the coupling between degrees of freedom defined in the fixed and moving frames of reference, which may trigger off internal resonances. Further, the rotational speed of the rotor is not constant due to the stochastic turbulence, which may also influence the stability. In this paper, a robust measure of the dynamic stability of wind turbines is suggested, which takes the collective blade pitch control and non-linear aero-elasticity into consideration. The stability of the wind turbine is determined by the maximum Lyapunov exponent of the system, which is operated directly on the non-linear state vector differential equations. Numerical examples show that this approach is promising for stability identification of the non-linear wind turbine system.