Optimal Pitch Control Design With Disturbance Rejection for the Controls Advanced Research Turbine

Abstract

Advanced and model-based control techniques have become prevalent in modern wind turbine controls in the past decade. These methods are more attractive compared to the commonly used proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, as the turbine structural flexibility is increased with multiple and coupled modes. The disturbance accommodating control (DAC) is an effective turbine control approach for the above-rated wind speed region. DAC augments the turbine state-space model with a predefined disturbance waveform model, based on which the controller reduces the impact of wind disturbances on the system output (e.g., rotor speed). However, DAC cannot completely reject the wind disturbance in certain situations, and this results in steady-state regulation errors in the turbine rotor speed and electric power. In this paper, we propose a novel wind turbine pitch control using optimal control theory. The obtained feedback and feedforward control terms function to stabilize the turbine system and reject wind disturbances, respectively, derived systematically based on the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves desired rotor speed regulation with significantly reduced steady-state errors under turbulent winds, which is simulated on the model of the three-bladed controls advanced research turbine (CART3) using the FAST code.