Modal Analysis on a Wind Turbine Blade Based on Wind Tunnel Experiments

This paper describes the evaluation of a time domain algebraic modal parameters identification methodology. This methodology is applied on a wind turbine blade. The natural frequencies and modal damping factors associated to the blade are estimated from measurements of velocities. A comparison with usual modal identification techniques is performed in order to evaluate and establish the main contributions of the proposed approach. The modal parameter identification algorithms are implemented to run (but not limited to) on a Matlab platform running in a PC using measurements obtained from a laser vibrometer and the corresponding data acquisition system. The results show the performance and parametric estimation of the proposed algebraic identification approach.