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

Presentation at the Wind Energy Science Conference 2023 as part of the Mini Symposium "IEA Wind Task 52: Lidar-Assisted Control, Turbulence Estimation, and Digitalization" 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 to control benefits. In this work, a single-beam continuous-wave or a pulsed lidar system is simulated in the spinner of a bottom-fixed IEA 15MW wind turbine. 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 brings much more control benefits than the one based on the nacelle, and it can be as helpful as a 4-beam CW nacelle lidar for feedforward control