Comparative Performance Assessment of Tuned Mass Dampers for Vibration Suppression in Monopile Offshore Wind Turbines Under Different Operational Conditions

Abstract

A tuned mass damper (TMD) is one of the dominant technologies for vibration control in offshore wind turbines (OWT). However, the variation in their vibration mitigation performance across a range of typical load cases throughout the full service life of wind turbines remains to be comprehensively assessed. This paper investigates the vibration mitigation patterns of TMDs on the dynamic responses of OWTs across five typical operational and extreme load cases, namely cut-in wind speed, rated power operation, cut-out wind speed, and two categories of extreme wind conditions. The results demonstrate that TMDs do not exert significant control effects across all load cases and response indicators. Their vibration mitigation effect on nacelle acceleration is the most stable and prominent, with optimal performance achieved under the cut-out wind speed shutdown load case, where the peak fore-aft vibration mitigation rate can reach 60.0%. However, the vibration mitigation rate of tower top displacement under normal operating load cases is significantly lower than that under shutdown conditions; the peak fore-aft displacement mitigation rate under the rated wind speed load case is merely 7.8%. The fore-aft foundation reaction forces achieve limited mitigation from TMD control, with a slight negative vibration mitigation effect even observed under extreme wind conditions. The effect of frequency detuning exhibits pronounced directional heterogeneity. For the side-to-side direction, −20% detuning reduces the mitigation rate from 45.0% to 29.2%, while for the fore-aft direction, +10% detuning increases it from 58.2% to 72.6% under rated operating conditions.