Feedforward pitch control for a 15 MW wind turbine using a spinner-mounted single-beam lidar

Abstract. Feedforward blade pitch control is one of the most promising lidar-assisted control strategies due to its significant improvement in rotor speed regulation and fatigue load reduction. A high-quality preview of the rotor-effective wind speed is a key element of control benefits. In this work, a single-beam lidar is simulated in the spinner of a bottom-fixed IEA 15 MW wind turbine. Both continuous-wave (CW) and pulsed lidar systems are considered. The single-beam lidar can rotate with the wind turbine rotor and scan the inflow with a circular pattern, which mimics a multiple-beam nacelle lidar at a lower cost. Also, the spinner-based lidar has an unimpeded view of the inflow without intermittent blockage from the rotating blade. The focus distance and the cone angle of the spinner-based single-beam lidar are optimized for the best wind preview quality based on a rotor-effective wind speed coherence model. Then, the control benefits of using the optimized spinner-based lidar are evaluated for an above-rated wind speed in OpenFAST with an embedded lidar simulator and virtual four-dimensional Mann turbulence fields considering the wind evolution. Results are compared against those using a single-beam nacelle-based lidar. We found that the optimum scanning configurations of both CW and pulsed spinner-based single-beam lidars lead to a lidar scan radius of 0.6 of the rotor radius. Also, results show that a single-beam lidar mounted in the spinner provides many more control benefits (i.e. better rotor speed regulations and higher reductions in the damage equivalent loads on the tower base and blade roots) than the one based on the nacelle. The spinner-based single-beam lidar has a similar performance to a four-beam nacelle lidar when used for feedforward control.