Estimation of effective wind speed

The wind speed has a huge impact on the dynamic response of wind turbine. Because of this, many control algorithms use a measure of the wind speed to increase performance, e.g. by gain scheduling and feed forward.

Unfortunately, no accurate measurement of the effective wind speed is online available from direct measurements, which means that it must be estimated in order to make such control methods applicable in practice.

In this paper a new method is presented for the estimation of the effective wind speed. First, the rotor speed and aerodynamic torque are estimated by a combined state and input observer. These two variables combined with the measured pitch angle is then used to calculate the effective wind speed by an inversion of a static aerodynamic model.