Abstract
For mechanical load testing of wind turbines, capture matrix is constructed for various range of wind speeds according to the international standard IEC 61400-13. The conventional method wastes considerable amount of data by its invalid data policy -segment data into 10 minutes then remove invalid ones. Previously, we have suggested an alternative way to save the total amount of data to build a capture matrix, but the efficient selection of data has been still under question. The paper introduces optimization algorithms to construct capture matrix with less data. Heuristic algorithm (simple stacking and lowest frequency first), population method (particle swarm optimization) and Q-Learning accompanied with epsilon-greedy exploration are compared. All algorithms show better performance than the conventional way, where the distribution of enhancement was quite diverse. Among the algorithms, the best performance was achieved by heuristic method (lowest frequency first), and similarly by particle swarm optimization: Approximately 28% of data reduction in average and more than 40% in maximum. On the other hand, unexpectedly, the worst performance was achieved by Q-Learning, which was a promising candidate at the beginning. This study is helpful for not only wind turbine evaluation particularly the viewpoint of cost, but also understanding nature of wind speed data.