Lidar-Assisted Feedforward Individual Pitch Control to Compensate Wind Shear and Yawed Inflow

Lidar-assisted individual pitch control (IPC) has been investigated occasionally in recent years, focusing on the compensation of (vertical) wind shear as the main disturbance. Since yawed inflow might cause significant load fluctuations too, it is worth to compensate. Load patterns caused by yawed inflow significantly differ from those caused by wind shear, requiring a more sophisticated control algorithm. In this paper a lidar-assisted cyclic pitch feedforward control to compensate wind shear and yawed inflow is presented. The main objective is the analysis of the load patterns through a simplified aerodynamic model, which among other things focuses on a reasonable representation of the skewed wake effect. Establishing a suitable structure of the feedforward controller follows. The paper concludes with a comparison of fatigue load reductions achieved by three different controllers. Firstly, a well-known feedback individual pitch control; secondly, a feedforward controller for pure wind shear compensation and thirdly, this new feedforward controller to compensate wind shear and yawed inflow. The last two controllers use ideal lidar measurement chains.