Analysis of Adaptive Individual Pitch Control Schemes for Blade Fatigue Load Reduction on a 15 MW Wind Turbine

Manuel Lara, Sebastiaan Paul Mulders, Jan Willem van Wingerden, Francisco Vázquez, Juan Garrido*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
95 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Individual pitch control (IPC) is a method to mitigate periodic blade loads in wind turbines, and it is typically implemented using the multi-blade coordinate (MBC) transform, which converts the blade load measurements from a rotating frame into the non-rotating tilt axis and yaw axis. Previous studies have shown that by including an additional tuning parameter in the MBC, the azimuth offset reduces the coupling between non-rotating axes, allowing for higher performance levels for diagonal controller structures. In these studies, the decentralized control of IPC was composed of two identical integral controllers. This work analyzes and compares the improvement that the azimuth offset can provide in different adaptive gain scheduling IPCs where the diagonal controllers can have integral or proportional action with different gains. They are applied to a 15 MW wind turbine simulated with OpenFAST v3.5 software. The controller parameter tuning is addressed as an optimization that reduces blade fatigue load based on the damage equivalent load (DEL) and is resolved through genetic algorithms. Simulations show that only using different controller gains in IPC does not provide significant improvements; however, including azimuth offset in the optimal IPC schemes with integral controllers allows for the greatest DEL reduction with a lower actuator effort.

Original languageEnglish
Article number183
Number of pages20
JournalApplied Sciences (Switzerland)
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Keywords

  • blade load reduction
  • gain-scheduling control
  • genetic algorithms
  • individual pitch control
  • wind turbine control

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Analysis of Adaptive Individual Pitch Control Schemes for Blade Fatigue Load Reduction on a 15 MW Wind Turbine'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this