Model-based design optimisation of digital hydraulic pitch actuator for a large-scale wind turbine

Abstract

The valve throttle regulation issue in the proportional flow control valves reduces the performance of the hydraulic pitch system in large-scale wind turbines. To overcome this drawback, the high-response hydraulic 2/2 valves are utilised to develop the novel digital hydraulic pitch actuator. Consequently, an intelligent pitch cascade controller was developed to control the wind energy system and digital hydraulic pitch actuator. However, the performance of the digital hydraulic pitch actuator was poor during the preliminary simulation study. Thus model-based design optimisation was carried out to identify the optimal parameters of the digital hydraulic pitch actuator. Furthermore, two case studies were conducted using the developed wind energy system and a 5-MW wind turbine simulator to validate the proposed pitch control system. In all the case studies, the proposed pitch control system performed superior and generated rated power at above-rated wind speed when compared to the baseline proportional integral and neural controllers.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital hydraulic pitch actuator
• model-based design optimisation
• intelligent pitch cascade controller
• wind energy system
• rated power generation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Science and Engineering Research Board: [Grant Number TAR/2019/ 000008].