A disturbance decoupling nonlinear control law for variable speed wind turbines

This paper describes a nonlinear control law for controlling variable speed wind turbines using feedback linearization. The novel aspect of the control law is its ability to decouple the effect of wind fluctuations. Furthermore, the transformation to feedback linearizable coordinates is chosen intelligently so that the majority of the system structure is invariant under the transformation. Consequently the physical interpretation is preserved. The method assumes that the effective wind speed and acceleration are estimated from measurements on the wind turbine. The performance of the control is compared to that of a LQG controller using a specific wind turbine and wind model.