Wind turbine robust disturbance accommodating control using non‐smooth H ∞ optimization

Summary Disturbance accommodating control (DAC) has been developed in the last decades for wind turbines to control the rotor/generator speed and to reduce structural loads. The method allows accommodating unknown disturbance effects by using the combination of disturbance observers and disturbance rejection controllers. The actual main problem of DAC is to define suitable disturbance observer and controller gain matrices to achieve the desired overall performance including turbine speed regulation in combination with structural load mitigation. The disturbance rejection controller is often designed and tuned separately for individual applications and operating conditions. The closed‐loop system stability and uncertainties due to the use of the linearized reduced‐order model in controller synthesis procedure are not fully considered. This paper introduces a method to design DAC by optimizing the observer and controller parameters simultaneously to guarantee system performance respecting to structural loads mitigation, power regulation, and robustness. To eliminate the rotor speed control steady‐state error due to model uncertainties, partial integral action is included. Simulation results using NREL reference wind turbine models show that the proposed method successfully regulates the rotor speed without error despite the presence of the model uncertainties. Structural loads are also reduced using proposed method compared to DAC designed by Kronecker product method. The proposed approach is able to define a stable and robust DAC controller by solving a non‐smooth H ∞ optimization problem with structure and stability constraints.