Simultaneous vibration suppression and energy harvesting in wind turbine blades using optimized electromagnetic tuned mass dampers

Electromagnetic Tuned Mass Dampers (EMTMDs), integrating a conventional TMD with an electromagnetic transducer connected to an RLC circuit, are proposed to suppress edgewise vibrations of rotating wind turbine blades while simultaneously harvesting energy under turbulent aerodynamic loading. A simplified blade–EMTMD model is used to obtain optimal parameters through H2-optimization, which minimizes blade kinetic energy and maximizes harvested power, yielding identical optimal parameters for the NREL 5MW wind turbine. In the full turbine model, the optimized EMTMD achieves approximately 26.59% reduction in peak-to-peak edgewise blade-tip vibration, with a damper stroke of about 1.858 m and energy harvesting of approximately 315 kJ over 600 s. The damper stroke is relatively large; therefore, a genetic algorithm-based multi-objective optimization is employed to obtain a set of Pareto-optimal EMTMD parameters, considering the blade vibration, damper stroke, and harvested energy as the objective functions under the realistic aerodynamic loading. A Combined Performance Measure (CPM) based on weighted min–max normalization is introduced to select a single solution from the Pareto front. Using equal weights, the selected design achieves 26.67% blade vibration reduction, 305 kJ cumulative energy harvesting, and a reduced damper stroke of 1.386 m, which is significantly lower than that obtained from the H2−approach. The robustness of the optimized EMTMD is further evaluated under variations in blade edgewise stiffness, aerodynamic coefficients, mean wind speed, blade rotational speed, and frequency detuning. Overall, the EMTMD demonstrates effective vibration mitigation with simultaneous energy harvesting, offering its potential as an efficient dual-functional device for wind turbine blades.