Active Structural Load Mitigation in Wind Turbines Using Linear Unique Model Predictive Control

This paper describes a new model-based predictive controller, specially designed to enable its practical implementation. In that sense, it uses a unique linear model for the entire turbine operating range. To achieve this, external processing blocks are used to handle the nonlinearities present in the rotor aerodynamics. The objective of this active vibration control system is to reduce the structural load on the rotor and tower of wind turbines, without the need to use specific structural control actuators (e.g. tuned mass dampers). In fact, special effort is put in analyzing the additional effort to be made by the collective pitch actuators, to evaluate the circumstances in which the addition of specific control devices is advisable. Also, the proposed system works in parallel to the baseline controller in charge of the rotor speed control, thus avoiding the substitution of the latter.