Performance of disturbance augmented control design in turbulent wind conditions

This paper investigates the use of disturbance models in the design of wind turbine individual pitch controllers. Previous work has used individual pitch control and disturbance models with the Multiblade Coordinate Transformation to design controllers that reduce the blade loads at the frequencies associated with the rotor speed. This paper takes a similar approach of using a disturbance model within the H_∞ design framework to account for periodic loading effects. The controller is compared with a baseline design that does not include the periodic disturbance model. In constant wind speeds, the disturbance model design is significantly better than the baseline design at canceling blade loads at the rotor frequencies. However, these load reduction improvements become negligible even under low turbulent wind conditions. The two controllers perform similarly in turbulent wind conditions because disturbance augmentation improves load reduction only at the multiples of the rotor frequency in the yaw and tilt moment channels whereas turbulence creates strong collective bending moments. In addition, turbulent wind contains energy across a broad frequency spectrum and improvements at multiples of the rotor frequency are less important in these conditions. Therefore inclusion of periodic disturbance models in the control design may not lead to the expected load reduction in fielded wind turbines.