Driving Torque Control for a Nacelle Test Bench

Abstract

Recently wind industry paid a lot of attention to ground testing facilities in order to improve reliability of wind turbines by undergoing overall system tests at an early stage of development. Some experience has been gained during the last years with drive train test benches, that allow for pure mechanical and electrical tests of the turbine's components. Since the loads occurring inside a wind turbine significantly depend on its control strategy, the natural extension of drive train test benches are so-called nacelle test benches, which also include the wind turbine's controller. The worldwide first nacelle test bench was installed and launched at RWTH Aachen University in 2013. This nacelle test bench was set up as a demonstrator and has a rated power of 1 MW.

For the demonstrator test bench a gearbox-based drive train concept, which does not intrinsically meet the high dynamic requirements of the real-time aerodynamics simulation, was chosen. In this paper the mechanical concept is reviewed from a control engineering point of view and a detailed control model is presented and validated using measurement data. In order to minimize the impact this mechanical limitations have and to achieve the dynamics and accuracy required, a driving torque controller is proposed. Due to the communication layout at the nacelle test bench, time delay in data transfer cannot be omitted for controller design.

Experiments confirm that the driving torque controller allows to operate a wind turbine at the nacelle test bench and suppresses unrealistic, test bench-related torque dynamics.