A New Decentralized Pitch Control Scheme for Wind Turbines

Wind turbine rotor imbalances may be created by a multitude of causes, e.g. pitch misalignment, blade erosion. In such situations, machines experience undesired vibrations, which cannot be compensated or mitigated by the controllers generally adopted by industry today. This happens because the control action may be collective or both collective and cyclic, but, in order to cope with imbalances, it is necessary to employ a fully individual control which allows a blade to move independently from the others. In this paper we present a new individual pitch control algorithm able to simultaneously target the imbalance and reduce oscillating loads at frequencies multiple of the rotor revolution. The effectiveness of the proposed control is demonstrated in a high-fidelity simulation environment.