Disturbance Observer Based Control Design for Wind Turbine Speed Regulation

Disturbance observer based (DOB) control has been implemented in motion control to reject unknown or time-varying disturbances. In this research, an internal model-based disturbance observer (DOB) design combined with a PID type feedback controller is formulated for wind turbine speed and power regulation. The DOB controller facilitates model-based estimation and cancellation of disturbance using an inner feedback control loop. The disturbance observer combined with a compensator is further designed to deal with the model mismatch. The proposed method is applied to National Renewable Energy laboratory (NREL) offshore 5-MW wind turbine. Our case studies show that the DOB controller can achieve improved speed and power regulation compared to the baseline PID controller, and exhibit excellent robustness under different turbulent wind fields.

Conference paper