• Journal of Drive and Control
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.28-37
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• 2018

When the wind speed rises above the rated wind speed, the produced power of the wind turbines exceeds the rated power. Even more, the excessive power results in the undesirable mechanical load and fatigue. A solution to this problem is pitch control of the wind turbines. This paper presents a systematic design method of a collective pitch controller for the wind turbines using a discrete fuzzy Proportional-Integral (PI) controller. Unlike conventional PI controllers, the fuzzy PI controller has variable gains according to its input variables. Generally, tuning the parameters of fuzzy PI controller is complex due to the presence of too many parameters strongly coupled. In this paper, a systematic method for the fuzzy PI controller is presented. First, we show the fact that the fuzzy PI controller is a superset of the PI controller in the discrete-time domain and the initial parameters of the fuzzy PI controller is selected by using this relationship. Second, for simplicity of the design, we use only four rules to construct nonlinear fuzzy control surface. The tuning parameters of the proposed fuzzy PI controller are also obtained by the aforementioned relationship between the PI controller and the fuzzy PI controller. As a result, unlike the PI controller, the proposed fuzzy PI controller has variable gains which allow the pitch control system to operate in broader operating regions. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified with computer simulations using FAST, a NREL's primary computer-aided engineering tool for horizontal axis wind turbines.