A Novel Lift Controller for a Wind Turbine Blade Section Using an Active Flow Control Device Including Saturations: Experimental Results

In this article, a recently developed adaptive version of super-twisting is applied to the control of the aerodynamic lift on a wind turbine blade section, while considering local disturbances in the airflow. The proposed control law serves as a model-free control strategy, relying on only two parameters. This strategy reduces the need for tuning and modeling efforts: the first parameter governs the speed of gain variation, while the second parameter is associated with the desired accuracy, enabling control of unknown dynamics. We discuss the capability of the proposed model to track the lift reference of a wind turbine blade in the presence of external perturbations and actuator saturation. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of such control.