Design and Evaluation of a Wind Speed Estimator for Hub-height and Shear Components

Estimates of the effective wind speed disturbances acting on a turbine are useful in a variety of control applications. A Kalman filter-based wind speed estimator is presented here for estimation of the effective hub-height wind speed as well as linear horizontal and vertical shear components. The wind speed estimator is evaluated using an aeroelastic simulator with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s 5-MW turbine model. In addition, the impact of the dynamic inflow model, used during simulation, on the Kalman filter performance is investigated. The estimator generally performs well up to a bandwidth of 1 Hz, but inaccuracies in the linear model of the turbine degrade the performance near the frequency of a closed-loop mode caused by blade pitch control. With the introduction of realistic sensor noise, it was found that the estimator remains robust up to 1 Hz.