Robust control strategies for floating wind turbines: preliminary experimental results

This paper aims to design and experimentally apply controllers to a floating wind turbine (FWT) in operating Regions II and III. To achieve this, adaptive sliding-mode controllers with only two tuning parameters are used, simplifying the design by eliminating the need for a detailed dynamical model. This is a significant advantage over conventional baseline controllers. These controllers are implemented for the first time on a realistic experimental setup in a test tank to assess their robustness. Experimental studies have shown that the adaptive sliding-mode controllers deliver similar performance regarding generated power, rotor speed, and other parameters while requiring minimal control tuning effort.