Improvement of Small Wind Turbine Control in the Transition Region

Abstract

Wind energy conversion systems are very challenging from the control system viewpoint. The control difficulties are even more challenging when wind turbines are able to operate at variable speed and variable pitch. The contribution of this work is focused on designing a combined controller that significantly alleviates the wind transient loads in the power tracking and power regulation modes as well as in the transition zone. In a previous work, the authors studied the applicability of different multivariable decoupling methodologies. The methodologies were tested in simulation and verified experimentally in a lab-scale wind turbine. It was demonstrated that multivariable control strategies achieve a good closed-loop response within the transition region, where the interaction level is greater. Nevertheless, although such controllers showed an acceptable performance in the power tracking (region II) and power regulation (region IV) zones, appreciable improvement was possible. To this end, the new proposed methodology employs a multivariable gain-scheduling controller with a static decoupling network for the transition region and monovariable controllers for the power tracking and power regulation regions. To make the transition between regions smoother, a gain scheduling block is incorporated into the multivariable controller. The proposed controller is experimentally compared with a standard switched controller in the lab-scale wind turbine. The experiments carried out suggest that the combination of the proposed multivariable strategy for the transition region to mitigate wind transient loads combined with two monovariable controllers, one dedicated to region II and other to region IV, provide better results than traditional switched control strategies.