Wind Turbine Control Using Nonlinear Economic Model Predictive Control over All Operating Regions

Abstract

With the gradual increase in the installed capacity of wind turbines, more and more attention has been paid to the economy of wind power. Economic model-predictive control (EMPC) has been developed as an effective advanced control strategy, which can improve the dynamic economy performance of the system. However, the variable-speed wind turbine (VSWT) system widely used is generally nonlinear and highly coupled nonaffine systems, containing multiple economic terms. Therefore, a nonlinear EMPC strategy considering power maximization and mechanical load minimization is proposed based on the comprehensive VSWT model, including the dynamics of the tower and the gearbox in this paper. Three groups of simulations verify the effectiveness and reliability/practicability of the proposed nonlinear EMPC strategy.

Keywords

• variable-speed wind turbine
• tower fatigue
• drive-shaft torsion
• nonlinear economic-model predictive control