Systems Engineering for Lidar-Assisted Control: A Sequential Approach

Abstract

This work presents a sequential approach to explore and optimize the benefits of lidar-assisted control for wind turbines. The optimization is divided in three steps: lidar hardware, lidar data processing, and feedback controller optimization. Appropriate optimization criteria and computational efficient models are used for the intermediate steps and energy production is optimized in the last step with a full aero-elastic model to provide an estimation of lidar-assisted control without the need of a detailed cost model. The case study shows that lidar-assisted control together with an adjustment of the power level are promising to extend the life-time of wind turbines and finally increase the energy capture.