The development of a fatigue loading spectrum for small wind turbine blades

This paper details a formulation to create a fatigue loading procedure for the blade of a small wind turbine using a combination of detailed short-term aeroelastic and wind measurements and averaged long-term wind data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Detailed aeroelastic measurements from the blade of an operating small wind turbine were acquired simultaneously with wind speed measurements and show that the blade does not respond instantaneously to all changes in wind speed. A methodology has been developed to create a fatigue loading procedure using the blade stress cycles determined from the detailed measurements in conjunction with long-term wind data. The proposed method overcomes the necessity to acquire long-term detailed operational data before developing a blade fatigue loading procedure without compromising on accuracy.