Wind Tunnel Testing of an Optimal Feedback/feedfoward Control Law for Wind Turbines

With the development of lidar technology for measuring wind disturbances ahead of a wind turbine, various feedforward control techniques have been proposed to utilize preview disturbance information for rotor speed regulation. Among these is model predictive control (MPC), which generates an optimal control trajectory subject to system constraints, but very few physical tests have been conducted using MPC for wind turbines presumably due to the challenges involved in solving an optimization problem online. In this paper, we test an optimal feedback/feedforward control algorithm that maintains the clear disturbance inclusion of MPC but results in a linear control law that can be implemented easily. On the other hand, the proposed controller is not able to handle physical system constraints explicitly—full MPC is the subject of future work. A scaled wind turbine model in a wind tunnel is used for testing.