Wave Feedforward Control for Large Floating Wind Turbines*

Floating wind energy has attracted substantial interest since it enables the deployment of renewable wind energy in deeper waters. However, floating wind turbines are subjected to disturbances, predominantly from turbulence in the wind and waves hitting the platform. Wave disturbances cause undesired oscillations in speed and increase structural loading. This paper focuses on mitigating these disturbance effects with feedforward control using knowledge of the incoming wavefield. The control problem is formulated in an ${\mathcal{H}_\infty }$ optimization framework designing two wave feedforward controllers: one to reduce rotor speed oscillations, and the other one to minimize the platform pitch motion. Mid-fidelity time-domain simulations demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed control algorithm regarding wave disturbance mitigation at the cost of higher actuator duty.