Proactive control of wind turbine with blade load constraints

This paper describes an easy-to-implement, proactive control strategy for wind turbines, incorporating constraints on blade loads. The control strategy is aimed for rejecting wind gusts and is based on upwind speed measurements and a new statistical wind gust detection mechanism. The control action comprises simultaneous driveline and collective pitch control with constraints on flapwise bending moment. The controller is evaluated by simulation on a transient between two steady-state operational modes of the wind turbine. A new driveline backstepping-based controller with integral action for compensation of steady-state errors is also proposed and verified by simulations.