LIDAR-Assisted Exact Output Regulation for Load Mitigation in Wind Turbines

Optimizing wind turbine performance involves maximizing energy harvesting while seeking to minimize load fatigues on the tower structure, blades, and rotor. To improve turbine control performance, wind preview measurement technologies, such as light detection and ranging (LIDAR), have been a point of interest for researchers in recent years. In this article, we explore the application of a classical control methodology known as exact output regulation (EOR) for improving the control performance of a LIDAR-enhanced wind turbine. The EOR controller is designed to achieve the rejection of known input disturbances, while also ensuring the system output tracks the desired reference signal. The controller is comprised of a state feedback controller together with a feedforward gain. The LIDAR wind preview information is used to obtain a low-order exosystem for modeling wind dynamics. This wind exosystem is used to obtain the feedforward gain matrix that enables the EOR controller to effectively reject the input disturbance and achieve the desired reference tracking. Extensive simulations of the EOR controller with a broad range of wind speeds in both partial load and full load operating regions are performed on the full nonlinear aero-elastic model of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5-MW reference wind turbine. For performance comparisons, we also implement a Baseline torque controller and a commonly used feedforward control method known as disturbance accommodation control (DAC). The results show that, in comparison with a baseline and DAC controller, the EOR controller can provide a substantially improved reduction of fatigue loads and smoother power output, without compromising energy production levels.