Abstract To mitigate periodic loads on wind turbine blades, engineers employ individual pitch control (IPC) strategies. These systems implement individual commands for each blade, operating in conjunction with collective pitch control (CPC), which regulates the turbine rotational speed. Despite the efficacy of IPC methods in reducing blade fatigue in comparison with CPC alone, they substantially increase the pitch activity, which damage the actuators. This research addresses this critical trade-off by introducing a novel adaptive feedforward IPC strategy. This novel approach offers the crucial ability to adjust the IPC control effort, a feature challenging to implement in conventional systems and one which has been minimally explored in previous studies. The present paper analyses the balance between reducing fatigue and increasing control effort using a simulation of a 15 MW monopile wind turbine operating in the nominal region. The proposed balanced IPC achieves a similar percentage (15-20 %) compared to the CPC, both in terms of fatigue reduction and increase of control effort.
Lara et al. (Fri,) studied this question.