Wind and Wave Disturbances Compensation to Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Using Improved Individual Pitch Control Based on Fuzzy Control Strategy

Due to the rich and high quality of offshore wind resources, floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) arouses the attentions of many researchers. But on a floating platform, the wave and wind induced loads can significantly affect power regulation and vibration of the structure. Therefore, reducing these loads becomes a challenging part of the design of the floating system. To better alleviate these fatigue loads, a control system making compensations to these disturbances is proposed. In this paper an individual pitch control (IPC) system integrated with disturbance accommodating control (DAC) and model prediction control (MPC) through fuzzy control is developed to alleviate the fatigue loads. DAC is mainly used to mitigate the effects of wind disturbance and MPC counteracts the effects of wave on the structure. The new individual pitch controller is tested on the NREL offshore 5 MW wind turbine mounted on a barge with a spread-mooring system, running in FAST, operating above-rated condition. Compared to the original baseline collective pitch control (CPC) (Jonkman et al., 2007), the IPC system shows a better performance in reducing fatigue loads and is robust to complex wind and wave disturbances as well

A review of numerical modelling and optimisation of the floating support structure for offshore wind turbines

AbstractCompared to onshore wind power, floating offshore wind power is a promising renewable energy source due to higher wind speeds and larger suitable available areas. However, costs are still too high compared to onshore wind power. In general, the economic viability of offshore wind technology decreases with greater water depth and distance from shore. Floating wind platforms are more competitive compared to fixed offshore structures above a certain water depth, but there is still great variety and no clear design convergence. Therefore, optimisation of the floating support structure in the preliminary phase of the design process is still of great importance, often up to personal experience and sensibility. It is fundamental that a suitable optimisation approach is chosen to obtain meaningful results at early development stages. This review provides a comparative overview of the methods, numerical tools and optimisation approaches that can be used with respect to the conceptual design of the support structure for Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT) attempting to detail the limitations preventing the convergence to an optimal floating support structure. This work is intended to be as a reference for any researcher and developer that would like to optimise the support platform for FOWT

Hybrid Optimized Fuzzy Pitch Controller of a Floating Wind Turbine with Fatigue Analysis

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are systems with complex and highly nonlinear dynamics; they are subjected to heavy loads, making control with classical strategies a challenge. In addition, they experience vibrations due to wind and waves. Furthermore, the control of the blade angle itself may generate vibrations. To address this issue, in this work we propose the design of an intelligent control system based on fuzzy logic to maintain the rated power of an FOWT while reducing the vibrations. A gain scheduling incremental proportional–derivative fuzzy controller is tuned by genetic algorithms (GAs) and combined with a fuzzy-lookup table to generate the pitch reference. The control gains optimized by the GA are stored in a database to ensure a proper operation for different wind and wave conditions. The software Matlab/Simulink and the simulation tool FAST are used. The latter simulates the nonlinear dynamics of a real 5 MW barge-type FOWT with irregular waves. The hybrid control strategy has been evaluated against the reference baseline controller embedded in FAST in different environmental scenarios. The comparison is assessed in terms of output power and structure stability, with up to 23% and 33% vibration suppression rate for tower top displacement and platform pitch, respectively, with the new control scheme. Fatigue damage equivalent load (DEL) of the blades has been also estimated with satisfactory results.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the project MCI/AEI/FEDER number RTI2018-094902-B-C21 and PDI2021-123543OB-C21