A Switching Thrust Tracking Controller for Load Constrained Wind Turbines

A Switching Thrust Tracking Controller for Load Constrained Wind Turbines

Gonzalez Silva, J. (TU Delft Team Riccardo Ferrari)
van der Hoek, D.C. (TU Delft Team Jan-Willem van Wingerden)
Mulders, S.P. (TU Delft Team Jan-Willem van Wingerden)
Ferrari, Riccardo M.G. (TU Delft Team Riccardo Ferrari)
van Wingerden, J.W. (TU Delft Team Jan-Willem van Wingerden)

2022

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.

Costs
Wind speed
Switches
Production
Wind farms
Predictive models
Aerodynamics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2de09196-5fa7-4177-953d-769572353cde

https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC53348.2022.9867888

IEEE

2023-03-05

978-1-6654-5196-3

Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC 2022)

2022 American Control Conference, ACC 2022, 2022-06-08 → 2022-06-10, Atlanta, United States

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2022 J. Gonzalez Silva, D.C. van der Hoek, S.P. Mulders, Riccardo M.G. Ferrari, J.W. van Wingerden