Joint parameter-input estimation for digital twinning of the Block Island wind turbine using output-only measurements

This paper presents a recursive Bayesian inference framework for digital twinning of an offshore wind turbine (OWT) in the Block Island Wind Farm (BIWF), the first commercial offshore wind farm in the U.S. with jacket substructure. The framework employs a window-based extended Kalman filter (EKF) to jointly estimate the dynamic input loads and unknown model parameters of the finite element (FE) model of the turbine using sparse output-only measurements. The estimation of input loads on the OWT is critical for fatigue life estimation, foundation monitoring and control strategy. In the proposed joint estimation algorithm, unknown input time histories are divided into overlapping windows and the current window of inputs is concatenated with uncertain model parameters to form an augmented state vector. To account for the uncertainty about wind direction and misalignment between wind direction and the turbine yaw angle, two independent horizontal wind load time histories in X and Y directions are estimated at the nacelle level. A numerical validation study is first performed in which wind loads of the OWT are simulated using the multi-physics platform FAST, and structural vibration responses are generated using the FE model in OpenSees. The window-based EKF is implemented using the simulated measurements, and the estimations of structural stiffness as the updating model parameter and input loads are observed to have high accuracy. The proposed algorithm is then validated using in-situ measurements on one of the OWT in BIWF. To investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the method under different environmental and operational conditions, four cases are considered in which the turbine is operating at the rated rotor speed (region 3 of power generation), below the rated rotor speed (region 2), idling rotor state (region 1 or no power), and region 4 beyond cut-out wind speed. Accurate predictions of acceleration and strain data are obtained using the proposed algorithm, and the estimations of model parameter are consistent and close to their nominal value under different conditions. These results from numerical and experimental studies validate the proposed window-based EKF for joint parameter-input estimation and digital twinning for long-term structural health monitoring of the OWT.