Gain Scheduling Pitch Control for Fatigue Load Reduction for Wind Turbines

This work investigates several methods for the design of a pitch control system, which actively reduces the fatigue loads on the tower of a wind turbine. As major contribution, this work demonstrates that it is possible to design collective pitch controllers that, additionally to basic rotor speed control and active damping of the first fore-aft tower bending mode, allow to reduce the fore-aft tower bending loads due to 3p harmonic excitation.