Aerodynamic modeling of NREL 5-MWWind turbine for nonlinear control system design: A case study based on real-time nonlinear receding horizon control

Abstract

The work presented in this paper has two major aspects: (i) investigation of a simple, yet efficient model of the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) 5-MW reference wind turbine; (ii) nonlinear control system development through a real-time nonlinear receding horizon control methodology with application to wind turbine control dynamics. In this paper, the results of our simple wind turbine model and a real-time nonlinear control system implementation are shown in comparison with conventional control methods. For this purpose, the wind turbine control problem is converted into an optimization problem and is directly solved by the nonlinear backwards sweep Riccati method to generate the control protocol, which results in a non-iterative algorithm. One main contribution of this paper is that we provide evidence through simulations, that such an advanced control strategy can be used for real-time control of wind turbine dynamics. Examples are provided to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented scheme.