Publications Details

Uncertainty quantification of wind turbine blade load measurement, estimation, and transformation

Ennis, Brandon L.; Paquette, Joshua P.; White, Jonathan

This paper describes the process of transforming measured blade loads, with force estimation, to wind turbine quantities of interest. Uncertainty quantification on the blade load measurement and force estimation is derived and used to estimate uncertainty on aerodynamic torque and rotor thrust for sample cases. A methodology is defined for calculating mean values and quantifying the uncertainty in these important quantities of interest for wind turbines when your available data includes only blade root moment measurements. This paper is not intended to provide precise values for these uncertainties at the current stage, however, sample measurement uncertainties are defined and used along with representative mean values to identify the sensitivity of uncertainty in torque and thrust to the constituent variables and associated uncertainties. The largest contributors of the uncertainty when using blade strain gage measurements to estimate rotor loads is identified for the sample cases revealing the components that have the largest effect on the resulting quantity of interest’s uncertainty, and those which have negligible effect on the uncertainty.