Wai Hou Lio

Fundamental performance similarities between individual pitch control strategies for wind turbines

ABSTRACT The use of blade individual pitch control (IPC) offers a means of reducing the harmful turbine structural loads that arise from the uneven and unsteady forcing from the oncoming wind. In recent years, two different and competing IPC techniques have emerged that are characterised by the specific loads that they are primarily designed to attenuate. In the first instance, methodologies, such as single-blade control and Clarke transform-based control, have been developed to reduce the unsteady loads on the rotating blades, whilst tilt-yaw control and its many variants instead target load reductions in the non-rotating turbine structures, such as the tower and main bearing. Given the seeming disparities between these controllers, the aim of this paper is to show the fundamental performance similarities that exist between them and hence unify research in this area. Specifically, we show that single-blade controllers are equivalent to a particular class of tilt-yaw controller, which itself is equivalent to Clarke transform-based control. This means that three architecturally dissimilar IPC controllers exist that yield exactly the same performance in terms of load reductions on fixed and rotating turbine structures. We further demonstrate this outcome by presenting results obtained from high-fidelity closed-loop turbine simulations.

A review on applications of model predictive control to wind turbines

This paper aims to give an overview of the recent development and benefits of model predictive control in wind turbines and its future potential. For a modern large wind turbine, the main objective of control is to maximise the power production while maintaining the fatigue loads to be minimal. With such multiple objectives, a multivariable system and actuators constraints the popular PI controller may become ineffective or hard to tune whereas MPC provides a systematic approach for designing a multivariable controller incorporating the knowledge of actuator constraints. This paper reviews the wind turbine control problem and in particular gives a survey of the use of model predictive control on wind turbines.

Performance Similarities Between Individual Pitch Control Strategies

The use of blade individual pitch control (IPC) offers a means of reducing the harmful turbine structural loads that arise from the uneven and unsteady forcing from the oncoming wind. In recent years two different and competing IPC techniques have emerged that are characterised by the specific loads that they are primarily designed to attenuate. In the first instance, methodologies such as single-blade control and Clarke Transform-based control have been developed to reduce the unsteady loads on the rotating blades, whilst tilt-yaw control and its many variants instead target load reductions in the non rotating turbine structures, such as the tower and main bearing. Given the seeming disparities between these controllers, the aim of this chapter is to investigate and understand the fundamental performance similarities that exist between them and hence unify research in this area. And a significant new result in this chapter shows that single-blade controllers are equivalent to a particular class of tilt-yaw controller, which itself is equivalent to Clarke Transform-based control. This means that three architecturally dissimilar IPC controllers exist that yield exactly the same performance in terms of load reductions on fixed and rotating turbine structures. This chapter further demonstrates this outcome by presenting results obtained from high-fidelity closed-loop turbine simulations.

Blade-pitch control for wind turbine load reductions

Large wind turbines are subjected to the harmful loads that arise from the spatially uneven and temporally unsteady oncoming wind. Such loads are the known sources of fatigue damage that reduce the turbine operational lifetime, ultimately increasing the cost of wind energy to the end users. In recent years, a substantial amount of studies has focused on blade pitch control and the use of real-time wind measurements, with the aim of attenuating the structural loads on the turbine blades and rotor. However, many of the research challenges still remain unsolved. For example, there exist many classes of blade individual pitch control (IPC) techniques but the link between these different but competing IPC strategies was not well investigated. In addition, another example is that many studies employed model predictive control (MPC) for its capability to handle the constraints of the blade pitch actuators and the measurement of the approaching wind, but often, wind turbine control design specifications are provided in frequency-domain that is not well taken into account by the standard MPC. To address the missing links in various classes of the IPCs, this thesis aims to investigate and understand the similarities and differences between each of their performance. The results suggest that the choice of IPC designs rests largely with preferences and implementation simplicity. Based on these insights, a particular class of the IPCs lends itself readily for extracting tower motion from measurements of the blade loads. Thus, this thesis further proposes a tower load reduction control strategy based solely upon the blade load sensors. To tackle the problem of MPC on wind turbines, this thesis presents an MPC layer design upon a pre-determined robust output-feedback controller. The MPC layer handles purely the feed-forward and constraint knowledge, whilst retaining the nominal robustness and frequency-domain properties of the pre-determined closed-loop. Thus, from an industrial perspective, the separate nature of the proposed control structure offers many immediate benefits. Firstly, the MPC control can be implemented without replacing the existing feedback controller. Furthermore, it provides a clear framework to quantify the benefits in the use of advance real-time measurements over the nominal output-feedback strategy.

On wind turbine down-regulation control strategies and rotor speed set-point

The use of down-regulation or curtailment control strategies for wind turbines offers means of supporting the stability of the power grid and also improving the efficiency of a wind farm. Typically, wind turbine derating is performed by modifying the power set-point and subsequently, the turbine control input, namely generator torque and blade pitch, are acted on to such changes in the power reference. Nonetheless, in addition to changes in the power reference, derating can be also performed by modifying the rotor speed set-point. Thus, in this work, we investigate the performance of derating strategies with different rotor speed set-point, and in particular, their effect on the turbine structural fatigue and thrust coefficient were evaluated. The numerical results obtained from the high-fidelity turbine simulations showed that compared to the typical derating strategy, the derated turbines might perform better with lower rotor speed set-point but it is crucial to ensure such a set-point does not drive the turbine into stalled operations.

Analysis and design of a tower motion estimator for wind turbines

The use of blade individual pitch control (IPC) provides a means of alleviating the harmful turbine loads that arise from the uneven and unsteady forcing from the oncoming wind. Such IPC algorithms, which mainly target the blade loads at specific frequencies, are designed to avoid excitations of other turbine dynamics such as the tower. Nonetheless, these blade and tower interactions can be exploited to estimate the tower movement from the blade load sensors. As a consequence, the aim of this paper is to analyse the observability properties of the blade and tower model and based on these insights, an estimator design is proposed to reconstruct the tower motion from the measurements of the flap-wise blade loads, that are typically available to the IPC. The proposed estimation strategy offers many immediate benefits, for example, the estimator eliminates the need for a motion sensor on the tower, and the estimated signals can be used for control or fault monitoring purposes. We further show results obtained from high-fidelity turbine simulations to demonstrate the performance of the proposed estimator.

Predictive control design on an embedded robust output-feedback compensator for wind turbine blade-pitch preview control

The use of upstream wind measurements has motivated the development of blade-pitch preview controllers to improve rotor speed tracking and structural load reduction beyond that achievable via conventional feedback design. Such preview controllers, typically based upon model predictive control (MPC) for its constraint handling properties, alter the closed-loop dynamics of the existing blade-pitch feedback control system. This can result in the robustness properties of the original closed-loop system being no longer preserved. As a consequence, the aim of this work is to formulate a MPC layer on top of a given output-feedback controller, with a view to retaining the closed-loop robustness and frequency-domain performance of the latter. The separate nature of the proposed controller structure enables clear and transparent qualifications of the benefits gained by using preview and predictive control. This is illustrated by results obtained from closed-loop simulations upon a high-fidelity turbine, showing the performance comparison between a nominal feedback compensator and the proposed MPC-based preview controller.