Convex economic model predictive control for blade loads mitigation on wind turbines

Economic model predictive control (EMPC) has received increasing attention in the wind energy community due to its ability to trade-off economic objectives with ease. However, for wind turbine applications, inherent nonlinearities, such as from aerodynamics, pose difficulties in attaining a convex optimal control problem (OCP), by which real...

The Proportional Integral Notch and Coleman Blade Effective Wind Speed Estimators and Their Similarities

The estimation of the rotor effective wind speed is used in modern wind turbines to provide advanced power and load control capabilities. However, with the ever increasing rotor sizes, the wind field over the rotor surface shows a higher degree of spatial variation. A single effective wind speed estimation therefore limits the attainable...

Load reduction for wind turbines: an output-constrained, subspace predictive repetitive control approach

Individual pitch control (IPC) is a well-known approach to reduce blade loads on wind turbines. Although very effective, IPC usually requires high levels of actuator activities, which significantly increases the pitch actuator duty cycle (ADC). This will subsequently result in an increase of the wear on the bearings of the blades and a decrease...

The Immersion and Invariance Wind Speed Estimator Revisited and New Results

The Immersion and Invariance (II) wind speed estimator is a powerful and widely-used technique to estimate the rotor effective wind speed on horizontal axis wind turbines. Anyway, its global convergence proof is rather cumbersome, which hinders the extension of the method and proof to time-delayed and/or uncertain systems. In this letter, we...

Enabling Co-Innovation for a Successful Digital Transformation in Wind Energy Using a New Digital Ecosystem and a Fault Detection Case Study

In the next decade, further digitalisation of the entire wind energy project lifecycle is expected to be a major driver for reducing project costs and risks. In this paper, a literature review on the challenges related to implementation of digitalisation in the wind energy industry is first carried out, showing that there is a strong need for...

Individual pitch control by convex economic model predictive control for wind turbine side-side tower load alleviation

The wind turbine side-side tower motion is known to be lightly damped. One viable active damping solution is realized by deploying individual pitch control (IPC) such that counteracting blade forces are created to alleviate the tower fatigue loading caused by this motion. Existing IPC methods for side-side tower damping in the literature,...

Data-Driven Incipient Fault Detection via Canonical Variate Dissimilarity and Mixed Kernel Principal Component Analysis

Incipient fault detection plays a crucial role in preventing the occurrence of serious faults or failures in industrial processes. In most industrial processes, linear, and nonlinear relationships coexist. To improve fault detection performance, both linear and nonlinear features should be considered simultaneously. In this article, a novel...

Floating offshore wind turbine fault diagnosis via regularized dynamic canonical correlation and fisher discriminant analysis

Over the past decades, Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) has gained increasing attention in wind engineering due to the rapidly growing energy demands. However, difficulties in turbine maintenance will increase due to the harsh operational conditions. Fault diagnosis techniques play a crucial role to enhance the reliability of FOWTs and...

Fault-tolerant individual pitch control of floating offshore wind turbines via subspace predictive repetitive control

Individual pitch control (IPC) is an effective and widely used strategy to mitigate blade loads in wind turbines. However, conventional IPC fails to cope with blade and actuator faults, and this situation may lead to an emergency shutdown and increased maintenance costs. In this paper, a fault-tolerant individual pitch control (FTIPC) scheme...

Fault diagnosis of the 10MW Floating Offshore Wind Turbine benchmark: A mixed model and signal-based approach

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) operate in the harsh marine environment with limited accessibility and maintainability. Not only failures are more likely to occur than in land-based turbines, but also corrective maintenance is more expensive. In the present study, a mixed model and signal-based Fault Diagnosis (FD) architecture is...

Fault Detection of the Mooring system in Floating Offshore Wind Turbines based on the Wave-excited Linear Model

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) are more prone to suffer from faults and failures than bottom-fixed counterparts due to the severe wind and wave loads typical of deep water sites. In particular, mooring line faults may lead to unacceptably high operation and maintenance costs due to the limited accessibility of FOWTs. Detecting the...