Abstract: It has been demonstrated that mechanical loads of wind turbines can be effectively reduced by using inerter-based dynamic vibration absorbers（IDVA）. This paper investigates the influence of IDVAs’ locations on the load mitigation performance of wind turbines. To identify the optimal location of IDVA,a dynamic model based on Lagrange equations is derived for an onshore wind turbine,and an optimization method is proposed for IDVA parameters. In the optimization problem,the influence of IDVA locations on the tower in terms of the vibration reduction performance is considered,and the trade-off between the tower top displacement and the relative displacement of IDVA is studied. The results show that better vibration reduction performances can be obtained with higher IDVA locations. If the relative displacement of IDVA is not constrained,the vibration reduction performance can be significantly improved;while if the relative displacement of IDVA is constrained,the vibration reduction performance could be slightly degraded compared with the case without the relative displacement constraint of IDVA. It is found that there exist trade-offs between tower top displacement and the relative displacement of IDVA,where those cannot be simultaneously improved.