Disturbance Observer-Based Pitch Control of Wind Turbines for Enhanced Speed Regulation

Time-varying unknown wind disturbances influence significantly the dynamics of wind turbines. In this research, we formulate a disturbance observer (DOB) structure that is added to a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) feedback controller, aiming at asymptotically rejecting disturbances to wind turbines at above-rated wind speeds. Specifically, our objective is to maintain a constant output power and achieve better generator speed regulation when a wind turbine is operated under time-varying and turbulent wind conditions. The fundamental idea of DOB control is to conduct internal model-based observation and cancelation of disturbances directly using an inner feedback control loop. While the outer-loop PID controller provides the basic capability of suppressing disturbance effects with guaranteed stability, the inner-loop disturbance observer is designed to yield further disturbance rejection in the low frequency region. The DOB controller can be built as an on–off loop, that is, independent of the original control loop, which makes it easy to be implemented and validated in existing wind turbines. The proposed algorithm is applied to both linearized and nonlinear National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) offshore 5-MW baseline wind turbine models. In order to deal with the mismatch between the linearized model and the nonlinear turbine, an extra compensator is proposed to enhance the robustness of augmented controller. The application of the augmented DOB pitch controller demonstrates enhanced power and speed regulations in the above-rated region for both linearized and nonlinear plant models.