Decentralized Two-phase Control of a Wind Turbine Array for Power optimization

The conventional control scheme of wind turbine arrays seeks each wind turbine to maximize its own power production without consideration of the wake effect between wind turbines. This significantly lowers the power production of the downstream wind turbines due to reduced wind speed inside the wake, thus leading to inefficient power capture at the wind turbine array level. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a decentralized two-phase control scheme for maximizing the total power production of a wind turbine array. This scheme is composed of two control phases. During the first control phase, a decentralized optimization control scheme is derived based on the Park wake model, the total power production is then improved by solving the sub-optimum control actions for individual wind turbines. During the second control phase, the sub-optimized control actions are further refined using a decentralized model-free control approach. Simulation results confirm the proposed scheme efficacy in maximizing overall production of a wind turbine array.