Multiple switching model predictive control of variable-speed horizontal wind turbine

The purpose of modern wind energy conversion systems is to extract the aerodynamic power from the wind and convert it to electric power. The most popular today is variable-speed horizontal wind turbine (HWT) with three blades. The main objective of this paper is to design the controller that is capable to optimize the power output in the lower wind speed region and to maintain the rotor power limits within the high wind speed region simultaneously. In order to accomplish this task we designed a multiple switching model predictive controller (MPC) with three separate controllers for various wind speed operating regions. In order to design multiple MPC the nonlinear model of wind turbine is represented by a set of local linear models for different regions. The simulation was conducted for different controller settings to validate the effectiveness of the considered MPC in presence of different system constraints on control variables and turbulent winds acting.