Quasilinear Control of Wind Farm Power Output

Quasilinear Control (QLC) is a set of methods for analysis and design of systems with nonlinear actuators and sensors. The approach of QLC is based on the method of stochastic linearization, which replaces each nonlinearity with an equivalent gain and bias. In this brief, we apply QLC to the design of controllers for regulating the power output of a wind farm with multiple wind turbines. Each of these turbines is modeled by a linear plant preceded by an asymmetric saturation nonlinearity, which accounts for the limited availability of wind. It is shown via numerical simulation that controllers designed using QLC perform significantly better in a broad range of wind farm operating regimes, compared with those designed using traditional linear methods in our earlier work, where saturation is ignored.