Robust Model-Free Control of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine under High Wind & Wave Conditions

Offshore wind energy can provide a substantial amount of the world’s current electricity demand. Yet, harvesting this energy poses additional technical and economic challenges to the design and control of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT). Different control strategies have been used to mitigate these challenges to increase the efficiency of the FOWTs and stabilize their power output. This paper presents a model-free adaptive control using Generalized Proportional Integral Control (GPIC) based on integral reconstruction in the form of robust Classical Compensation Networks (CCN) to control the collective pitch angle of a FOWT operating above rated wind speed (Region 3). The control is validated on a nonlinear model of a 5 MW FOWT with a semi-submersible platform and compared to the basic Gain Scheduling PI (GSPI) controller with Anti-Windup. Results show a more robust performance of the proposed controller under various wind and wave conditions.