Self-Tuning Control Techniques for Wind Turbine and Hydroelectric Plant Systems

The interest on the use of renewable energy resources is increasing, especially towards wind and hydro powers, which should be efficiently converted into electric energy via suitable technology tools. To this aim, self-tuning control techniques represent viable strategies that can be employed for this purpose, due to the features of these nonlinear dynamic processes working over a wide range of operating conditions, driven by stochastic inputs, excitations and disturbances. Some of the considered methods were already verified on wind turbine systems, and important advantages may thus derive from the appropriate implementation of the same control schemes for hydroelectric plants. This represents the key point of the work, which provides some guidelines on the design and the application of these control strategies to these energy conversion systems. In fact, it seems that investigations related with both wind and hydraulic energies present a reduced number of common aspects, thus leading to little exchange and share of possible common points. This consideration is particularly valid with reference to the more established wind area when compared to hydroelectric systems. In this way, this work recalls the models of wind turbine and hydroelectric system, and investigates the application of different control solutions. Another important point of this investigation regards the analysis of the exploited benchmark models, their control objectives, and the development of the control solutions. The working conditions of these energy conversion systems will also be taken into account in order to highlight the reliability and robustness characteristics of the developed control strategies, especially interesting for remote and relatively inaccessible location of many installations.