Higher-order Moment Stability of Large Wind Turbine Blades under Stochastic Perturbations

The current trend in offshore wind energy is to design and install systems with larger swept areas that yield unprecedented efficiency. Long and slender blades are needed to achieve this objective. As a result of aerodynamic and structural tailoring, slender blades are particularly susceptible to various dynamic instability phenomena during standard operations. One of these phenomena is the bending-torsion flutter that may lead either to structural failure or system breakdown. The research author has been examining blade flutter under the influence of stochastic perturbations, which include both flow turbulence and aeroelastic load variability. A reduced-order Markov model has been used to describe the effects of the various random perturbations. Mean-square stability has been recently explored; results suggest that perturbations may negatively impact the flutter angular speed and increase the risk of failure. In this study the model is employed to investigate moment stability beyond mean squares, observing that dynamic instability involves nonlinear propagation of the perturbations and may exhibit amplitude dependency. Third-order instability is investigated and compared against previous numerical results. The NREL 5MW reference wind turbine blade is used as a benchmark example.