Fractional Sliding Mode Control of Wind Turbines

Wind energy constitutes an important renewable resource for environmentally safe production of electricity. To assure maximum energy capture, the turbine rotor tracks a nominal profile depending on the wind speed, requiring a fast and robust controller to overcome the presence of disturbances and abrupt wind speed changes. Besides, just a part of the wind power is available for energy production, and the problem is exacerbated in the case of turbulent components in the air flow, resorting to consider fractal topological properties to estimate its regularity. To deal with non-differentiable components in the turbulent wind, a robust controller is proposed by means of a continuous fractional sliding mode scheme. Numerical simulations are presented to highlight the reliability of the proposed method.