A Switching Thrust Tracking Controller for Load Constrained Wind Turbines
Abstract
Wind turbines are prone to structural degradation, particularly in offshore locations. Based on the structural health condition of the tower, power de-rating strategies can be used to reduce structural loads at the cost of power losses.This paper introduces a novel closed-loop switching control architecture to constrain the thrust in individual turbines. By taking inspiration from developments in the field of reference governors, an existing demanded power tracking controller is extended by a thrust tracking controller. The latter is activated only when a user-defined constraint on fore-aft thrust force is exceeded, which can be set based on the actual damage status of the turbine. Having a down-regulation with monotonic aerodynamic load response, a simple linear thrust tracking controller is proposed. Such a scheme can reduce aerodynamic loads while incurring acceptable losses on power production which, in a wind farm setting, can be compensated for by other turbines. Large eddy simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme on satisfying thrust constraints.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.05413,
title = {A Switching Thrust Tracking Controller for Load Constrained Wind Turbines},
author = {Jean Gonzalez Silva and Daan van der Hoek and Sebastiaan Paul Mulders and Riccardo Ferrari and Jan-Willem van Wingerden},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.05413},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages, 6 figures, This work has been accepted to the American Control Conference 2022 for publication under a Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-ND