Wind Turbine Controller to Mitigate Structural Loads on a Floating Wind Turbine Platform

Abstract

This paper summarizes the control design work that was performed to optimize the controller of a wind turbine on the WindFloat structure. The WindFloat is a semi-submersible floating platform designed to be a support structure for a multi-megawatt power-generating wind turbine. A controller developed for a bottom-fixed wind turbine configuration was modified for use when the turbine is mounted on the WindFloat platform. This results in an efficient platform heel resonance mitigation scheme. In addition several control modules, designed with a coupled linear model, were added to the fixed-bottom baseline controller. The approach was tested in a fully coupled nonlinear aero-hydroelastic simulation tool in which wind and wave disturbances were modeled. This testing yielded significant improvements in platform global performance and tower-base-bending loading.