Individual Blade Pitch Control Using Feed Forward LIDAR

Catch the Wind's Senior Technical Director, Fred Belen, gave the following presentation at CanWEA 2011 in Vancouver, BC in a session titled "R&D - New Technologies." This presentation focused on feed forward yaw control results and future pitch control development opportunities.

Presentation Abstract:

The ability to effectively control the pitch of individual blades is essential for extracting maximum energy from and reducing premature wear and tear on new large utility scale wind turbines. However, due to limitations in sensing technology, it has been difficult to design these complex control algorithms with the required robustness. The emergence of look-ahead LIDARs for turbine control have created the opportunity to develop robust individual blade pitch control algorithms. This presentation will provide results from simulations of new feed-forward individual blade pitch control algorithms showing improved performance due to the look-ahead measurements. We will also show that simply using the look-ahead measurements in the current yaw control algorithm greatly reduce loads on large utility scale wind turbines.

Individual Blade Pitch Control Using Feed Forward LIDAR