Predictive control of an experimental wind turbine using preview wind speed measurements

Abstract

The development of a more reliable method of measuring the wind field upstream of a turbine (light detection and ranging) has enabled the implementation of feedforward-related control strategies to enhance the control performance of wind turbines. By incorporating wind speed measurements, the controller is able to anticipate upon future events and thereby improve structural load mitigation and power regulation of the wind turbine. This work aims to experimentally verify the benefits of using predictive and feedforward-based control strategies over industry standard control solutions. To achieve this, both a feedforward and a model predictive control strategy are presented, which have been validated on an experimental wind turbine in a wind tunnel. Both the model predictive controller and feedforward algorithm have shown superior performance over a baseline controller in terms of rotor speed regulation under wind speed disturbances. The experiment confirmed that a phase advantage in the control input of the predictive controller led to this performance increase. It has also been found that knowledge of just the current wind speed can already significantly increase the control performance.

Full-scale field test of a model predictive control system for a 3 MW wind turbine

“…However, studies, such as [6] and [9], validated MPC algorithms for WTs in system simulations and verified the implementation's real-time capability in a standard computer hardware. Furthermore, [10] conducted wind tunnel tests with a small-scale wind turbine using an MPC algorithm also executed in standard computer hardware. Moreover, [11] focuses on the computational performance of a nonlinear MPC and a moving horizon estimator for airborne wind energy systems using automatic code generation for the experimental validation in an industrial PC.…”

Design of a Preview Controller for Discrete-Time Systems Based on LMI

“…In many cases, the future target signal or external disturbance for servo systems is known. For example, in vehicle active suspension [1,2], wind turbines [3], the robot system [4], and so on, their destination paths are specified in advance. We naturally seek to ascertain how to take full advantage of the known future information to improve the control performance or tracking performances.…”

Experimental wind tunnel testing of linear individual pitch control for two-bladed wind turbines

“…In the past, wind tunnel tests were carried out in the context of a downwind free yawing wind turbine [15]. Furthermore, model-predictive control has been used to alleviate gust loads by measuring the wind speed upwind of the wind turbine [16] and load reduction capabilities by means of blades equipped with actuator flaps (smart rotor) were assessed in [17]. The design of a scaled-down aero-servo-elastic wind tunnel model of the 3 MW Vestas V90 wind turbine is described in [18].…”

“…The design of a scaled-down aero-servo-elastic wind tunnel model of the 3 MW Vestas V90 wind turbine is described in [18]. The small-scale wind turbine presented in this paper is an evolution of the experimental setup used in [16,19].…”