A novel lift controller for a wind turbine blade section using an active flow control device: experimental results

In this paper, a very recent adaptive version of super-twisting is applied to the control of the aerodynamic lift over wind turbine blades taking into account local disturbances of the air flow. The proposed control law acts as a model-free control strategy that is based on the definition of only two parameters. Thanks to this strategy, the tuning and modeling efforts are reduced: the first parameter is acting on the gain variation speed, whereas the second one is linked to the expected accuracy, thus allowing the control of unknown dynamics. The ability of the proposed control algorithm is discussed to track a lift reference for a wind turbine blade in presence of external perturbations. Experimental results globally illustrate the feasibility of such a control.