Influence of scaling effects on hub loads of a horizontal wind turbine

Wind industry aims to generate more energy and reduce energy cost by increasing energy capacity of machines. As a result the loading scales up non-linearly. Nowadays there is a lack of studies of variation loads (specially fatigue ones) due to the up-scaling of wind turbine. This paper aims to generate a general fatigue load trends of several wind turbines, which are available to public. The accuracy of a controller of wind turbine models was investigated by checking blade root bending moments. Subsequently, fatigue loads were calculated based on these bending moments of blade root for each wind turbine model. The obtained results demonstrated possibility to generate the general load trend among the models. Additionally the blade root loading was divided into deterministic and stochastic parts, where each part was investigated the effect on fatigue loads. Moreover, a sensitivity study was performed to identify how much of influence does wind turbulence was on fatigue loads by the increasing reference turbulence intensity.