LiDAR-enabled model predictive control of wind turbines with real-time capabilities

Both controllers are tested in a high fidelity environment comprising of both a LiDAR and an aeroservoelastic simulator, in deterministic and unfrozen turbulent wind conditions. The numerical experiments show that the receding horizon controller outperforms a standard non-LiDAR-enabled one, as expected and as already reported by other authors. More interestingly, the second simpler controller is shown to provide for an almost similar performance of the more sophisticated one, although at a much lower and trivial computational cost. This behavior is interpreted as being due to the fact that, given the high disturbance level and the frequent solution update, even a rough approximation of the control problem is still capable of capturing the essence of the LiDAR preview information.