A real-time MHE and NMPC scheme for wind turbine control

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a strong candidate for the control of large Multi-Mega Watt Wind Turbine Generators (WTG). Several MPC and some Nonlinear MPC schemes have been proposed in the literature, formulating the problem of balancing the power generation against the structural and actuator fatigue through a reference-tracking scheme. While the resulting schemes offer very promising results in term of load reduction, especially when reliable LIDAR systems are available, no NMPC scheme fast enough to achieve a real-time implementation has yet been proposed. This paper presents such a real-time NMPC scheme. Moreover, the proposed scheme uses directly the power generation as a cost function, as opposed to tracking the optimal wind-dependent WTG steady-state.