Synthesis of nonlinear controller for wind turbines stability when providing grid support

This paper presents a new nonlinear polynomial controller for wind turbines that assures stability and maximizes the energy produced while imposing a bound in the generated power derivative in normal operation (guarantees a smooth operation against wind turbulence). The proposed controller structure also allows eventually producing a transient power increase to provide grid support, in response to a demand from a frequency controller. The controller design uses new optimization over polynomials techniques, leading to a tractable semidefinite programming problem. The ability of the wind turbine to increase its power under partial load operation has been analysed. The aforementioned optimization techniques have allowed quantifying the maximum transient overproduction that can be demanded to the wind turbine without violating minimum speed constraints (that could lead to unstable behaviour), as well as the total generated energy loss. The ability to evaluate this shortfall has permitted the development of an optimization procedure in which wind farm overproduction requirements are divided into individual turbines, assuring that the total energy loss in the wind farm is minimum, while complying with the maximum demanded power constraints. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.