Control System Design for a 20 MW Reference Wind Turbine

The increasing needs of energy and the requirement that an important percentage of this energy has to arise from renewable sources encourages the efforts for stepping up the capacity of wind turbines. However, enlarging wind energy converters brings with it many difficulties and challenges because structures becomes larger and more flexible, which implies limited stability regions and increasing of loads.

Thus, control becomes essential to achieve a stable operation with reduced loads and maximum generation. While industry is developing wind turbines up to 9.5 MW, research efforts are concentrated to the first studies on 20 MW machines. The current work presents a control system design for a 20 MW wind turbine.

Preliminary simulation results are satisfactory such that the developing of large machines are promising.