The inception of OMA in the development of modal testing technology for wind turbines

Wind turbines are immense, flexible structures with aerodynamic forces acting on the rotating blades at harmonics of the turbine rotational frequency. These harmonics are comparable to the modal frequencies of the structure. Predicting and experimentally measuring the modal frequencies of wind turbines have been important to their successful design and operation. Performing modal tests on wind turbine structures over 100 m tall is a substantial challenge, which has inspired innovative developments in modal test technology. For wind turbines, a further complication is that the modal frequencies are dependent on the turbine rotation speed. The history and development of a new technique for acquiring the modal parameters using output-only response data, called the Natural Excitation Technique (NExT), will be reviewed, showing historical tests and techniques. The initial attempts at output-only modal testing began in the late 1980s with the development of NExT in the 1990s. NExT was a predecessor to Operational Modal Analysis (OMA), developed to overcome these challenges of testing immense structures excited with natural environmental inputs. We will trace the difficulties and successes of wind turbine modal testing from 1982 to the present.