The use of preview wind measurements for blade pitch control

Abstract Light detection and ranging systems are able to measure conditions at a distance in front of wind turbines and are therefore suited to providing preview information of wind disturbances before they impact the turbine blades. In this study, preview-based disturbance feedforward control is investigated for load mitigation. Performance is evaluated assuming highly idealized wind measurements that rotate with the blades and compared to performance using more realistic stationary measurements. The results obtained using idealized, “best case” measurements show that excellent performance gains are possible with reasonable pitch rates. However, the results using more realistic wind measurements show that without further optimization of the controller and/or better processing of measurements, errors in determining the shear local to each blade can remove any advantage obtained by using preview-based feedforward techniques.