The use of blade individual pitch control (IPC)udprovides a means of alleviating the harmful turbine loads thatudarise from the uneven and unsteady forcing from the oncomingudwind. Such IPC algorithms, which mainly target the blade loadsudat specific frequencies, are designed to avoid excitations of otherudturbine dynamics such as the tower. Nonetheless, these bladeudand tower interactions can be exploited to estimate the towerudmovement from the blade load sensors. As a consequence, theudaim of this paper is to analyse the observability properties of theudblade and tower model and based on these insights, an estimatoruddesign is proposed to reconstruct the tower motion from theudmeasurements of the flap-wise blade loads, that are typicallyudavailable to the IPC. The proposed estimation strategy offersudmany immediate benefits, for example, the estimator obviates theudneed for hardware sensor redundancy, and the estimated signalsudcan be used for control or fault monitoring purposes. We furtherudshow results obtained from high-fidelity turbine simulations touddemonstrate the performance of the proposed estimator.
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