SMARTEOLE

The ambition of the present project is to improve the efficiency of the wind energy production by proposing innovative control solutions at the scale of the wind farm, the wind turbine and the blade, with an increasing degree of maturity. To take up this challenge, the consortium comprises some expertise from industrial to fundamental research experts, covering all degrees and scales of investigations (theoretical development, experimental testing at lab and at full scale, modeling and simulations) in the domains of fluid mechanics, control sciences and metrology. It is then composed of 2 industrial partners, Maia Eolis and Avent Lidar Technology, and 4 research organizations LML, PRISME, LAAS and IFPEn (application-oriented Research lab). In order to mitigate the aerodynamic load fluctuations that wind turbines are subjected to, SMARTEOLE aims to contribute to the overall problematic by developing a concept of smart rotor which is a rotor monitored by LIDAR-assisted control strategies. This rotor is equipped of an anticipated vision of the incoming flow conditions, with the help of a turbine-mounted LIDAR system developed by ALT, and of distributed actuators and sensors in order to control in real-time the aerodynamic performance of the energetic system. To reach this goal, three different scales of actuation are planned in this project: the blade, the wind turbine and the wind farm scales. Depending on the maturity of the control solutions, two types of experiments will be performed: full scale experiments in ME wind turbine farms with control strategies developed by IFPEn, and small scale ones in wind tunnel facilities of LML and PRISME, with control strategies developed by LAAS and PRISME. - Blade scale: The objective is to control the aerodynamic performance of the blade through a modification of the pressure distribution, meaning a modification of circulation, with fluidic and/or plasma actuators distributed over the blade. The innovative potential of closed-loop active circulation control to mitigate aerodynamic loads for wind energy applications will be demonstrated through lab experiments. - Wind turbine scale: The previous control strategy will be tested at lab scale for rotating blades with the help of a wind turbine bench. For full scale issues, the feed-forward pitch control strategies will be developed by the integration of a new input, which is the anticipative measurement of the wind conditions. These optimized strategies will be confronted to the current pitch control strategies implemented in the wind turbines operated by ME. The conventional pitch control is already mature since it is extensively used in industrial wind turbines but the present objective is to improve its performance by adding the LIDAR-assisted functionality, which is a promising but not yet used technology. -Wind farm scale: some new strategies of distributed production regarding each wind turbine will be proposed according to the incoming wind conditions (wake interactions for instance). During field testing on a wind farm from the operator partner, the performances of its wind turbines will be controlled in real time with dedicated global control strategies developed to maximize the overall farm production. The relevance of the tested strategies will be checked through the instantaneous power production gain.