On the Vibration-Based Modal Parameter Identification of Large Wind Turbine Blades

The blades directly affect the safety and power generation efficiency of the wind turbines. With the blade size increases, the reliable modal identification becomes important for vibration-based health monitoring. Although operational modal analysis (OMA) technique has been used in condition monitoring for the wind turbine blades, most existing studies focus on investigating a specific single method or under ideal excitation conditions. To overcome this limitation, this study takes the IEA-15MW large wind turbine blade as the research object and compares three OMA methods through numerical simulations, namely covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification (SSI-COV), frequency domain decomposition (FDD), and poly-reference least squares complex frequency domain (PolyMAX). The performance of the modal parameter identification methods is evaluated with respect to different sensor layouts, blade–tower coupling conditions, and environmental excitations. The results indicate that sparse sensor deployment cannot reliably identify the damage-sensitive high-order and complex modes. A nine-channel layout concentrated near second-order deformation regions significantly improves the identification of second-order flapwise frequencies and controls the average error of the first six modes within 3%. PolyMAX shows the best identification stability under different numbers and layouts of the sensors. Blade–tower coupling changes the blade modal characteristics and increases identification difficulty. Under this condition, FDD can still identify both low-order and high-order modes with good stability. Under different real wind conditions, the increasing wind speed causes the aerodynamic load to deviate from the white noise assumption, generally leading to fluctuations in the identification errors, with relatively large local errors occurring at certain medium and high wind speeds. Overall, the three OMA methods show different advantages under different identification conditions. PolyMAX shows the best stability under different sensor layouts and performs best when wind speed increases in the coupled wind turbine model, indicating that it is the most suitable for the actual complex coupling effects and environmental conditions. This research hopefully provides a basis for the subsequent engineering application of vibration-based modal identification of large offshore blades.