Feedback–feedforward individual pitch control for wind turbine load reduction

Abstract This paper focuses on the problem of wind turbine fatigue load reduction by means of individual pitch control (IPC). The control approach has a two‐degree‐of‐freedom structure, consisting of an optimal multivariable LQG controller and a feedforward disturbance rejection controller based on estimated wind speed signals. To make the control design problem time invariant, all signals are transformed to the non‐rotating reference frame using the Coleman transformation. In the Coleman domain, the LQG control objective is minimization of the rotor tilt and yaw moments, whereas the feedforward controller tries to achieve even further improvement by rejecting the influence of the low‐frequency components of the wind on the rotor moments. To this end, the tilt‐ and yaw‐oriented components of the blade‐effective wind speeds are approximated using stochastic random walk models, the states of which are then augmented with the turbine states and estimated using a Kalman filter. The effects of these (estimated) disturbances on the controlled outputs are then reduced using stable dynamic model inversion. The approach is tested and compared with the conventional IPC method in simulation studies with models of different complexities. The results demonstrate very good load reduction at not only low frequencies (1p blade fatigue load reduction) but also at the 3p frequency, giving rise to fatigue load reduction of the non‐rotating turbine components. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.