PLC implementation of blade‑pitch‑based rotor speed control in a didactic wind turbine
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/ja-cea.2026.47.13662Keywords:
process control, control system design, model validation, disturbance rejection, programmable logic controllers, control education using laboratory equipmentAbstract
Achieving a realistic reproduction of the behavior of a commercial wind turbine in a laboratory environment is an almost unattainable challenge. The experimental alternatives available in laboratories typically focus on only a subset of the phenomena present in real installations—such as structural response, energy production, grid injection, torque or pitch control- but they rarely allow all these aspects to be addressed simultaneously and operate at power levels far below those of commercial wind turbines. This work is carried out using one of these didactic wind turbines, acknowledging its inherent limitations. The study focuses on a particularly relevant variable: the rotor speed control system through blade pitch manipulation. A cascaded control architecture is proposed, implemented on a PLC and supervised through a SCADA. In parallel, a simplified model is presented that reproduces the dynamics of the real system at specific operating points, thereby facilitating the analysis and validation of the proposed control scheme.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Francisco Vazquez, Manuel Lara, María Luisa Delgado, Antonio Ruiz, Juan Garrido
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