Wind turbines may experience local weather perturbation, which is not taken into account by the commonly-used wind turbine simulation packages. Without this information, it is extremely challenging to evaluate the controller performance with regard to the effect of the variation of local atmospheric conditions. On the other side, it is too late and costly to wait until field test time. To fill this gap, in this paper, we develop a control-oriented turbine dynamic simulation framework to evaluate the controller performance considering the perturbation of local atmospheric conditions. This goal is achieved by integrating an internal wind turbine (IWT) model in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation tool. The proposed framework is implemented on a 5MW reference wind turbine, where the effects of the local atmospheric conditions are illustrated. The proposed WRF-IWT model are validated by comparing the results with those derived from the Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence (FAST).

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The current trend in the evolution of wind turbines is to increase their rotor size in order to capture more power. This leads to taller, slender and more flexible towers, which thus experience higher dynamical loads due to the turbine rotation and environmental factors. It is hence compelling to deploy advanced control methods that can dynamically counteract such loads, especially at tower positions that are more prone to develop cracks or corrosion damages. Still, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, little to no attention has been paid in the literature to load mitigation at multiple tower locations. Furthermore, there is a need for control schemes that can balance load reduction with optimization of power production. In this paper, we develop an Economic Model Predictive Control (eMPC) framework to address such needs. First, we develop a linear modal model to account for the tower flexural dynamics. Then we incorporate it into an eMPC framework, where the dynamics of the turbine rotation are expressed in energy terms. This allows us to obtain a convex formulation, that is computationally attractive. Our control law is designed to avoid the "turn-pike" behavior and guarantee recursive feasibility. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller on a 5MW reference WT model: the results illustrate that the proposed controller is able to reduce the tower loads at multiple locations, without significant effects to the generated power.@en