Abstract
IEA Wind Task 32 serves as an international platform for the research community and industry to identify and mitigate barriers to the use of lidars in wind energy applications. The workshop “Optimizing Lidar Design for Wind Energy Applications” was held in July 2016 to identify lidar system properties that are desirable for wind turbine control applications and help foster the widespread application of lidar-assisted control (LAC). One of the main barriers this workshop aimed to address is the multidisciplinary nature of LAC. Since lidar suppliers, wind turbine manufacturers, and researchers typically focus on their own areas of expertise, it is possible that current lidar systems are not optimal for control purposes. This paper summarizes the results of the workshop, addressing both practical and theoretical aspects, beginning with a review of the literature on lidar optimization for control applications. Next, barriers to the use of lidar for wind turbine control are identified, such as availability and reliability concerns, followed by practical suggestions for mitigating those barriers. From a theoretical perspective, the optimization of lidar scan patterns by minimizing the error between the measurements and the rotor effective wind speed of interest is discussed. Frequency domain methods for directly calculating measurement error using a stochastic wind field model are reviewed and applied to the optimization of several continuous wave and pulsed Doppler lidar scan patterns based on commercially-available systems. An overview of the design process for a lidar-assisted pitch controller for rotor speed regulation highlights design choices that can impact the usefulness of lidar measurements beyond scan pattern optimization. Finally, using measurements from an optimized scan pattern, it is shown that the rotor speed regulation achieved after optimizing the lidar-assisted control scenario via time domain simulations matches the performance predicted by the theoretical frequency domain model.
Highlights
In the past decade, lidar-assisted control (LAC) of wind turbines has become an important research topic in the wind energy community [1]
The objective of this paper is to provide a summary of how lidar systems can be optimized for control applications in order to overcome the barriers preventing the widespread deployment of LAC
The results presented in this paper are based on the outcome of the IEA Wind Task 32 workshop “Optimizing Lidar Design for Wind Turbine Control Applications” held in Boston, MA in July 2016
Summary
Lidar-assisted control (LAC) of wind turbines has become an important research topic in the wind energy community [1]. Participants from academia, national research laboratories, as well as the lidar and wind turbine industries discussed the barriers preventing the widespread use of lidars for wind turbine control, strategies for overcoming those barriers, and ideas for maximizing the effectiveness of lidars for control applications. In this paper, both practical considerations for overcoming the obstacles to the use of lidars for control and theoretical approaches for optimizing lidar scan patterns are discussed. A similar ZephIR lidar system was placed in the hub, or spinner, of a MW-scale wind turbine, as discussed by Mikkelsen et al [5], allowing continuous measurement of the wind inflow without
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