Analysis of Power-Maximizing Region 2 Controllers for Wind and Marine Turbines: Article No. 032051

David Stockhouse, Daniel Zalkind, Hannah Ross, Lucy Pao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Wind and marine energy are rapidly growing and complementary technologies that share some techniques for simplified modeling and control, particularly in below-rated flow speeds. A turbine operator has several choices of controller for maximizing power in Region 2. The simple and ubiquitous K..omega..2 control law is often effective but limited in its flexibility. Alternative controllers use reference tracking to split the control objectives into a low-bandwidth optimal tip-speed ratio tracking loop to maximize steady-state power and a higher-bandwidth proportional-integral control loop to reject inflow turbulence. Several options exist for identifying the slowly varying optimal set point during operation, based on estimating the inflow velocity or filtering the power or torque signals. This study compares the trade-offs between performance and other design priorities for a few choices of reference-tracking controller in the literature for reference wind and marine turbines. Analysis is performed in the frequency domain using the linearization of each controller, and the impact of turbulent disturbances on the closed-loop system is described. The controllers are simulated in OpenFAST to analyze their performance with higher-order nonlinear turbine dynamics.
Original languageAmerican English
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Physics: Conference Series
Volume2767
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-5700-89144

Keywords

  • controls
  • marine energy
  • region 2
  • wind energy

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