Modified hill climbing method for active yaw control in wind turbine

Due to the inaccuracy of the wind vane for measuring the wind direction, the wind turbine may not capture the maximum generating power point. This study proposes a modified hill climbing control (HCC) method for an active yaw control in the horizontal axis wind turbines. The presented method adopts the varying control steps obtained through bisecting-plane (BP) algorithm during the searching procedure, which is more efficient and accurate than the HCC method with the constant searching step. The wind turbine can rotate to certain yaw angle based on the measurement of wind vane, and then the modified HCC method is applied to find the desired yaw angle to capture maximum wind energy. The proposed methods are verified through the simulation based on the aerodynamic loading under smooth and turbulent wind profiles obtained from the simulation of a 1.5 MW variable-speed turbine model on the FAST (Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structural and Tower) software developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).