Active Power Control of Waked Wind Farms: Compensation of Turbine Saturation and Thrust Force Balance

Abstract: Active power control regulates the total power generated by wind farms with the power consumed on the electricity grid. Due to wake effects, the available power is reduced and turbulence is increased at downstream wind turbines. Such effects lead to a design challenge for wind farm control, where the delicate balance between supply and demand should be maintained, while considering the load balancing in the wind turbine structures. We propose a control architecture based on simple feedback controllers that adjusts the demanded power set points of individual wind turbines to compensate for turbine saturations and to balance thrust forces. For compensation purposes, the dynamics of power tracking in the wind turbines is approximated as a pure time-delay process, and the thrust force balance design is based on an identified linear model of the turbines. In this paper, we show that the proposed control architecture allows the generated power to track its reference even when turbines saturate, while the thrust forces are balanced. In addition, the result shows that the proposed power dispatch strategy, which considers thrust force balance, also avoids turbine saturation, being thus beneficial for energy production. The effectiveness of the proposed feedback controller is demonstrated using high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations of a small wind farm.