Control-based strategy for effective wind speed estimation in wind turbines

This paper deals with a control-based observer structure used for effective wind speed estimation in a wind turbine operating in partial load. The central idea is that this input estimation can be achieved based on system output tracking using a high-gain control loop. One of the consequences is that the system entire state estimation can also be performed. The resulted observer is simple and easy to tune. Numerical simulations show that effective wind speed is reconstructed with a good dynamic, thus being able to replace anemometer information for diagnosis and output power assessment purposes. The basic idea of this paper is quite general, as it can be applied to a large class of systems having unknown inputs.