Multiloop Control of Floating Wind Turbines: Tradeoffs in performance and stability

The expected growth of floating offshore wind energy is remarkable, with the U.S. Department of Energy projecting exponential increases in installed capacity persisting over the next few decades
[1]
. Reductions in cost of energy that have attracted industry adoption have in part been brought about through control advancements, including the introduction of auxiliary feedback loops in addition to conventional single-input, single-output (SISO) controllers. However, industry projects tend to be risk-averse, favoring incremental pragmatic solutions to immediate problems
[2]
, so many sophisticated control methods in academia have not been applied at scale due to their complexity. There is a use-case for simple intuitive controllers that achieve improved performance without significantly increasing the complexity of the controller, such as structured multiloop control (see “Summary”).