Abstract
Wind energy is one of the main renewable energy sources in the current
energy transition. Due to ever more and ever larger wind turbines (WT),
the requirements for WT operation become more complex. Model predictive
control (MPC) for WTs shows the potential to handle these requirements
and conflicting control objectives in a single optimization-based
controller. Recent research has widely investigated MPC for WT in
simulation, but mostly lacks experimental validation. This work aims to
experimentally validate MPC on a full-scale WT under real conditions. To
this end, we combine an Extendend Kalman Filter for nonlinear state
estimation with robust linear time-varying MPC. We evaluate the proposed
control algorithm in terms of time-domain performance and power curve in
simulation. However, the main contribution of this work is the
experimental validation on a 3MW WT in Northern Germany with a total
duration of 3h continuous full access of the controller. We were able to
demonstrate stable operation of the proposed MPC in the upper partial
load regime, transition regime and lower full load regime, at measured
wind speeds between 4.76m/s and 13.06m/s, inside and outside the wake
shadow of another WT. The power curve determined in simulation shows
comparable results to a reference feedback controller. The MPC
formulation combines several control objectives in a single optimization
problem, yet the tuning effort still remains complex. In future work, we
plan to reduce the complexity of the control loop based on this
experimentally validated MPC. We provide our experimental data at
https://github.com/rwth-irt/MPC_WT_experiment.