From Cut-In to Rated: Multi-Region Floating Offshore Wind Farm Control for Secondary Frequency Regulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-region control framework for floating offshore wind farms, employing novel controllers and model predictive control approaches to enhance power regulation and market participation.

Contribution

It presents a pioneering multi-region control scheme integrating turbine dynamics and market objectives for floating offshore wind farms.

Findings

Both control approaches achieved over 89.9% in secondary frequency regulation tests.

LPVTD-MPC is faster but has slightly larger power fluctuations than NL-MPC.

The framework addresses large wind speed variations due to wave-induced platform pitching.

Abstract

This paper describes a multi-region control framework for floating offshore wind farms. Specifically, we propose a novel generator torque controller that regulates rotor speed in Region 2, corresponding to wind speeds between the cut-in and rated values. In Region 3 (wind speeds at or above rated but below cut-out speed) we employ a PI-LQR for collective blade pitch. Control blending across the transitional wind speeds (Region 2.5) employs a sigmoid weighting function applied to the control variables. Two modeling paradigms are proposed for farm-level power tracking with rotor speed regularization: a nonlinear model predictive controller (NL-MPC) with a dynamic wake model, and a reduced order model predictive controller based on linear parameter varying turbine models with a time delay representation of wake advection (LPVTD-MPC). These approaches are evaluated over three wind inlet conditions using the PJM ancillary service certification criteria for participation in a secondary frequency regulation market. Results show that both approaches achieve scores of at least 89.9\% for the three different testing scenarios, which are well above the qualification threshold of 75\%. However, the LPVTD-MPC approach solves the problem in under half the time versus NL-MPC but with slightly larger fluctuations in farm-level power output, highlighting the trade-off between performance and computational tractability. The control framework is among the first to address multi-region wind turbine dynamics together with market driven power tracking objectives for floating offshore wind farms. Such multi-region control becomes increasingly necessary in the floating turbine setting where large (region spanning) wind speed variations are common due to wave induced platform pitching.