A comparison of control concepts for wind turbines in terms of energy capture

In this study, eight different control concepts for wind turbines are compared in terms of their annual energy capture. In detail, they are a stall controlled single speed concept, a stall controlled two speed concept, an active stall controlled single speed concept, an active stall controlled two speed concept, a pitch controlled single speed concept, a pitch controlled two speed concept, a stall controlled variable speed concept and finally a pitch controlled variable speed concept. In order to be able to expose all these different concepts to exactly the same wind conditions, numerical computer simulation is chosen as the appropriate method to do the comparison, as in reality it is almost impossible to achieve the same wind conditions for different turbines. This approach also prevents all possible differences in rotor layout between the individual concepts from entering into the results, as it is possible to use the same rotor design for all control concepts. Because the influence of time variant quantities such as the turbulent wind flow on a nonlinear system ( e.g. a wind turbine rotor) has to be taken into account, an analytical representation had to be found which allowed a time-step simulation. This especially set some limits on the complexity allowed for the numerical model. Therefore the modeling of all parts of the system (whether they are aerodynamic, mechanic or electric) is kept rather simplistic. As a comparison of general control concepts is the topic of this study, the controllers are not modeled as they are used by a certain manufacturer. Instead they are modeled in an idealized way, each of which covers the ideal performance of one class of control concepts. For each combination of parameters, one time domain simulation was performed. The output data was then weighted and averaged in order to obtain the energy captured from the wind within one year. These energy values are finally arranged in a way which allows an easy comparison between the relative performance of all control concepts under consideration. The results show the differences in the annual energy capture of the eight concepts as a function of site conditions (the annual mean wind speed, the turbulence and the shape parameter of the Weibull distribution assumed for the annual wind speed distribution) as well as their dependence on two design parameters (the design tip speed ratio and the choice of rotor profiles). Due to the rather crude modeling these results have to be seen more qualitatively then quantitatively. However, they show to which extent a comparison between different control concepts depends on the values of different parameters. Hopefully, they also lead to a deeper understanding of the very different results of similar comparisons found in the literature