Evaluation of Classical and Fuzzy Logic Controllers for Wind Turbine Yaw Control

This paper presents the performance comparison of two different controllers for wind turbine yaw control. The two controllers evaluated are a classical proportional-derivative (PD) controller and a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The controllers were separately used to operate the teetered rotor wind turbine presently being commissioned at the University of Texas at El Paso. Without an adequate dynamics model, the performance of the PD controller is not sufficient to ensure proper response in the steady state. In addition, the tuning process for selecting the optimum gains of the PD controller is an ad-hoc procedure depending on the wind condition. In contrast, the nonlinear nature of the FLC provides superior response to the control requirements regardless of the wind condition. Field experience gained from this experiment gives adequate confidence to apply the FLC for wind turbine yaw control.