Adaptive Robust Observer-Based Control for Structural Load Mitigation and Speed Regulation in Commercial Wind Turbines

As the size of wind turbines (WTs) increase, an additional increase in the structural load on the WT components is to be expected. This will have an impact on operational safety in terms of damage and service life. Spatial and temporal fluctuations in wind speed are responsible for the fatigue load during power generation. To minimize the effects of varying stresses, advanced control systems that incorporate appropriate models of the disturbances are proposed. These controllers are usually developed based on reduced-order models of nonlinear WTs, hence are affected by uncertainties such as modeling errors. Although robust controllers are able to deal with uncertainties, they are still only developed for design situations. Therefore, their performance can deteriorate significantly under very uncertain operating conditions. On the other hand, adaptive controllers are designed to consider multiple operating points in the design. However, most of these methods do not consider the optimization of different objectives in the design for structural load reduction or speed control of WTs. In this paper, a novel adaptive robust observer-based control strategy for structural load reduction and rotor speed regulation in commercial WTs operating at high wind speed regime is proposed. To achieve this, a robust disturbance accommodating controller (RDAC) is combined with an adaptive pitch controller (aIPC), which adapts to changing operating points. The proposed control method is tested on a 1.5 MW reference WT (RWT) developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The simulation results show that, compared with the state of the art presented on a gain-scheduled proportional integral (GSPI) and RDAC controllers, the proposed control method reduces the structural load on the rotor blades by 10.7 % and 9.2 %, respectively, and on the tower by 36.2 % and 8.4 %, respectively. Therefore, it makes a key contribution to mitigating the structural dynamic loads on WTs by reducing the load on multiple components. This is achieved without any significant impact on the rotor speed and power regulation performance or the generated power under changing operating conditions.