Individual Pitch Angle Robust Control of a Variable Speed Wind Turbine to Mitigate Mechanical Loads

Conspicuously, pitch angle control strategy has been applied to mitigate the influence of mechanical load and also output power control at above-rated wind speeds. In this paper, a wind turbine is modeled based on simplified two-mass model and an adaptive sliding mode controller (ASMC) is designed based on individual pitch control (IPC) strategy. To do this, the single-blade approach is used and the wind turbine was divided into aerodynamics and mechanical subsystems and governing equations of each subsystem were derived. By designing and applying the ASMC to two-mass model, system behavior is observed and simulated in terms of step and turbulent wind speed inputs. In addition, to verify the validity of the ASMC, the proposed controller is implemented in the FAST environment and the wind speed profiles are generated using TurbSim. In order to analyze the environmental effects on the dynamic behavior of the system, the controller performance is explored in presence of parametric uncertainties. It should be noted that rotor speed tracking error is evaluated and demonstrated through different criteria.