Constrained Control of Wind Turbines for Power Regulation in Full Load Operation

What is it about?

The safe operation of wind turbines is a vital criterion which should be considered in the controller design to avoid rotor over speeding and hazardous operation. In this regard, the main focus of this paper is to keep the wind turbine operating within given limits by considering constrained control concepts using the barrier Lyapunov function. The nonlinear model of a benchmark wind turbine is considered and the wind speed variation is assumed to be unmeasurable disturbance and consequently, utilising the radial basis function neural network, an aerodynamic torque estimator is designed. The proposed controller is evaluated via numerical simulations and its performance is compared to a practical industrial wind turbine controller and a quadratic Lyapunov-based controller.

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Why is it important?

Constrained Control has been emerged in last decade. It's application on wind turbine power regulation is quite unique. Indeed, the using the most of the modern controller the stability of wind turbine is guaranteed with respect to wind speed variation. But it is not assured "how the rotor speed or generated power deviate from nominal values as wind speed varies". So, in the most of wind turbine the mechanical brakes are adopted to make sure that if the rotor speeds violates the given value, the brakes are engaged to reduce the rotor speed. However, the mechanical brake induces too much stress, especially on gearbox. So, in this paper, by using Constrained Control, it is guaranteed that rotor speed does not violate the given limits, without engagement of brakes. To the best of authors' knowledge, this issue has not been tackled previously.