Pitch Control of Large Scale Wind Turbine Based on

Expert PID Control

Xia Anjun1,2,3 , Xu Hao1,2,3 , Hu Shuju1,3 , Xu Honghua1,3
1 Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences
2 Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
3 Key Laboratory of Wind Energy Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences
E-mail:xiaanjun@mail.iee.ac.cn

Abstract—Pitch control system is the most important part of
wind turbine to keep the rotor speed within its design limit.
Large scale wind turbines usually adopt PI controller to adjust
rotor speed above the rated wind speed. Since wind turbine
system is a high-order nonlinear system, one set of PI parameters
can’t achieve excellent control performance, especially when
wind turbulence is very strong. In view of the shortcoming of
conventional PI controller and nonlinear characteristics of wind
turbines, an expert PID controller based on a tracking-
differentiator is researched in this paper. The tracking-
differentiator is used to arrange transitions of the control
variables, such as the speed, and extract the one-order
differential signal reasonably, which has the potential to cope
with the nonlinear characteristics of wind turbines. The
simulation results show that proposed controller can effectively
restrain the overshoot of machine’s rotor speed and has better
control performances than conventional PI controller.
need to set up the accurate model of wind turbine, which is
difficult to implement in practice.
In this paper, an expert PID controller is designed for
variable speed and variable pitch wind turbine, which is based
on the tracking-differentiator. The tracking-differentiator is
used to arrange transitions of the control variables, such as the
rotor speed, and reasonably extract the one-order differential
signal from the speed deviation. The inputs of the expert PID
controller are the speed deviation and its one-order differential
signal. The proposed method is compared with the
conventional PI control strategy. It is shown that the
performance of the expert PID controller is satisfactory and the
proposed method is feasible.
II. WIND TURBINE MODEL

Keywords- wind turbine; pitch control; tracking differentiator;

It is well known that the power Pmech extracted by wind
expert PID controller turbine can be described as:
1
I. INTRODUCTION Pmech = CP( λ , β ) Aρ v3 (1)
2
In recent years, the development of wind energy has
received a lot of interest and considerable attentions because of Where CP( λ , β ) is the power coefficient, λ is the tip speed
the exhaustion of fossil fuels. With the increase of wind turbine ratio, β is the pitch angle, A is the area swept by blades.The
capacity, effective and reliable control methods become more relations among CP( λ , β ) , λ and β can be approximated as:
and more important for the machines to achieve good
performance. Compared to fixed speed wind turbines, variable
CP( λ , β ) = c1 (c2 / λi − c3 β − c4 )e − c5 / λi (2)
pitch variable speed wind turbines due to the high efficiency
are gradually becoming to the mainstream products on the 1 1 0.035
market. Pitch control system is the main part of wind turbines Where = − 3 , c1 = 0.22 , c2 = 116 ,
to keep machines’ speed within permissible limit when wind λi λ + 0.08β β + 1
speed above rated value [1] [2]. c3 = 0.4 , c4 = 0.5 , c5 = 12.5 .
Since wind speed isn’t constant and wind turbine is a high- The pitch angle β from equation (2) has an effect on the
order, nonlinear, strong coupling system, the conventional PI
control method, which is generally used in power and speed power coefficient CP( λ , β ) . By adjusting the pitch angle β ,
regulation, can hardly achieve excellent control performance the power wind turbine captured can be restrained and the rotor
when the operation state changes. Recently, a lot of pitch speed can also be effectively controlled above rated wind
control methods are proposed, such as fuzzy PID control [3], speed.
variable gain PID control [4], sliding mode control [5] and The dynamic response of the drive train for double-fed
LQR control [6]. Fuzzy PID control, which usually uses a wind turbines is shown to be:
fuzzy controller to adjust the PID gains, is suitable for the high-
order nonlinear system. Sliding mode control has the drawback •

of chattering. Variable gain PID control and LQR control both J Ω = Qa − G × Qg − k Ω (3)

978-1-4577-0321-8/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

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Where J is the total rotor inertia, Qa is the aerodynamic
torque, G is the ratio of the gearbox, Qg is the electromagnetic
torque of the generator, k is the rotor friction coefficient.
The pitch servo actuator can be modeled by a first-order lag
equation with time constant τ , which depends on the pitch
servo actuator [7]. The equation is shown as:
1 variable x1 (t ) . The variable x2 (t ) is the differential signal of
β= β ref
τ s +1
Where β is the pitch angle, β ref is the pitch angle reference
which is usually given by the main control system of the wind
turbine.
III. SYSTEM CONTROL
The purpose of the pitch control system proposed in this
paper is to keep the rotor speed of wind turbine at rated value
in high winds. When rotor speed is larger than rated speed, all
of each blade will be rotated about its axis to reduce the angle
of attack and hence the rotor speed will be held in the given
scope.
The expert PID control system based on a discrete tracking-
differentiator is shown in Fig.1.
x1 (t )
x2 (t )
Figure 1. The pitch control system configuration
Where, TD is the discrete tracking-differentiator which is used
to arrange transitions of the rotor speed by tracking its
deviation e(t ) from the rated speed, and extract high quality
one-order differential signal of e(t ) reasonably.
The equations of the discrete tracking-differentiator are
described as [8]:
­° x1 (t + h) = x1 (t ) + h × x2 (t )
® (5)
°̄ x2 (t + h) = x2 (t ) + h × u, u ≤ r
In these equations:
u = fst ( x1 (t ) − e(t ), x2 (t ), r , h0 )
d = r × h0 , d 0 = d × h0
y = x1 − e(t ) + h0 × x2
2
a0 = d + 8 × r × y
­ x2 + (a0 − d ) × sgn( y ) / 2, y > d0
a=®
¯ x2 + y / h0 , y ≤ d0
­r × a / d , a ≤ d
fst = − ®
¯ r × sgn(a), a > d
Where, h is the integral step size, r is the speed factor which
determines the tracking speed of the differentiator, h0 is the
filter factor which strongly affects the filtering performance of
the differentiator. The variable e(t ) is tracked by the
(4)
the variable x1 (t ) .
Expert PID controller can achieve satisfactory control
performance by changing the PID control mode, which
combines the expert knowledge and experience with
conventional PID controller [9]. As shown in Fig.1, the inputs
of the expert PID controller are the variable x1 (t ) and its
differential signal x2 (t ) . According to the inputs, we can divide
the expert PID controller into five conditions:
1) If x1 (t ) > M 1 , it means that the absolute value of the
rotor speed deviation is large. In the circumstances, regardless
of the trend of the deviation, the output of the controller should
be the largest or smallest to reduce the deviation as quickly as
possible. At this time, the system is equivalent to be regulated
by open-loop control. Where M 1 is the preset threshold.
2) If x1 (t ) x2 (t ) ≥ 0 , it means that the absolute value of the
rotor speed deviation has trend of increase. When x1 (t ) > M 2 ,
namely the deviation is also large. Where M 2 is the preset
threshold. The controller may be considered to implement
stronger control to change the trend of the deviation in the
direction of decreasing and reduce the absolute value of the
speed deviation quickly. The output of the controller may be
expressed as:
u (k ) = u (k − 1) + kl {k p [ x1 (t ) − x1 (t − 1)]
(6)
+ ki x1 (t ) + kd [ x2 (t ) − x2 (t − 1)]}
Where, u (k ) is the output of the controller, kl is the coefficient
which is used to adjust the strength of the output, k p is the
proportional coefficient, ki is the integral coefficient and kd is
the differential coefficient. When x1 (t ) < M 2 , namely the
deviation isn’t large. The controller may be considered to
implement general control as long as the trend of the deviation
changes in the direction of decreasing. The output of the
controller is:
u (k ) = u (k − 1) + k p [ x1 (t ) − x1 (t − 1)]
(7)
+ ki x1 (t ) + kd [ x2 (t ) − x2 (t − 1)]
3) If x1 (t ) x2 (t ) < 0 and x2 (t ) x2 (t − 1) > 0 or x1 (t ) = 0 , it
means that the absolute value of the rotor speed deviation is
decreasing or the system reaches the balanced state. The output
of the controller may remain constant.
4) If x1 (t ) x2 (t ) < 0 and x2 (t ) x2 (t − 1) < 0 , it means that the
rotor speed deviation is in the state of extreme.
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When x1 (t ) ≥ M 2 , at this time, the controller may be method is significantly smaller than that of conventional PI
method.
considered to implement stronger control:
u (k ) = u (k − 1) + kl k p xm (t ) (8)

Where, xm (t ) is the No. k extreme of x1 (t ) .

When x1 (t ) < M 2 , namely the deviation is very small. The

controller may be considered to implement weaker control:
u (k ) = u (k − 1) + ks k p xm (t ) (9)

5) If x1 (t ) < ε , it means that the deviation is very small.

Hence, the integral part is added in this condition to reduce the Figure 3. Rotor speed using conventional PI control
steady-state error of the system. Where ε is an arbitrary small
real number (natural number).

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The pitch control systems of the wind turbine are simulated
using bladed software to verify the control performance. It’s
focused on the above-rated wind speed region, where the goal
is to minimize the rotor speed fluctuation. The pitch control
system is used to regulate the rotor speed to the rated value
while the torque demanded by the torque controller is kept
constant at 13.403kNm. Figure 4. Rotor speed using expert PID control
The parameters of the wind turbine are given in the table I.
TABLE I. WIND TURBINE CHARACTERISTICS
Parameters Value
Rated power 2MW
Rated torque 13.403kNm
Gear box ratio 83.33
Rated wind speed 12m/s
Rotor diameter 80m
Rotor speed range 10.2~21.6 rpm
Rated rotor speed 18.0 rpm

Fig.2 shows the wind speed used in the simulation. The Figure 5. Pitch angle using conventional PI control
mean wind speed is 15 m/s. The turbulence intensity
[longitudinal, lateral, vertical] are 14.3573%, 11.425% and
8.3594% respectively.

Figure 6. Pitch angle using expert PID control

Interesting observation can be made from Fig.5 and Fig.6.

Figure 2. Wind speed at hub position
Fig.3 and Fig.4 are the rotor speed of wind turbines which
are controlled respectively by the conventional PI controller
and the proposed expert PID controller. The simulation results
illustrate that the rotor speed fluctuation of the expert PID
The results presented there gives the evidence that the expert
PID controller has rapider pitch angle respond to the wind
speed variation than the conventional PI controller, which is
beneficial to restrain the fluctuation of the rotor speed. From
these simulation results, it can be concluded that the expert PID

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control based on the tracking-differentiator is superior to
conventional PI control in the high wind speed range.

V. CONCLUSIONS
The expert PID control based on the tracking-differentiator
is researched in this paper. Simulation results show that the
proposed method has the characteristics of faster response,
smaller overshoot than the conventional PI method. The expert
PID controller is suitable for the high-order nonlinear wind
turbine system and can achieve satisfactory pitch control
performance.

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