Distributed Wind Park Control via Turbine Voting
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current wind parks rely on a single controller for managing power and reactive power, leading to system failures when this controller fails, resulting in inability to follow demand signals and potentially violating voltage and power output schedules.
Innovation Solution
A distributed mesh-style wind park control system where each wind turbine has its own controller, determining its power production capability and communicating with other turbines to establish a consensus power distribution schedule, ensuring continuous operation even if one turbine fails.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If a single controller is used to manage the entire wind park, then device complexity is reduced, but reliability deteriorates because the entire park fails when the single controller fails
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the centralized control function into distributed turbine-level controllers, with each controller managing its own wind turbine. This segmentation eliminates the single point of failure while maintaining manageable complexity at each distributed node, directly resolving the contradiction between simplified structure and system reliability.
2Reliability
If each wind turbine has its own controller with voting capability, then reliability is improved through redundancy, but device complexity increases due to multiple controllers and communication requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the control functions of multiple turbines into a consensus-based voting mechanism where each turbine controller participates in determining the park-wide power distribution. This combining approach achieves redundancy and reliability through distributed decision-making while managing complexity through standardized communication protocols and unified consensus algorithms.
Solution Approach 2:
The voting mechanism implements feedback loops where each turbine controller communicates its status and capabilities to others, receives votes, and adjusts power distribution accordingly. This feedback system enables automatic adaptation to failures and maintains reliability without requiring complex manual intervention or centralized coordination.
3Reliability
If a consensus voting mechanism is implemented across all turbine controllers, then reliability is enhanced through distributed decision-making, but communication requirements and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a voting mechanism where a majority consensus is sufficient to establish power distribution, rather than requiring unanimous agreement from all turbine controllers. This partial action approach achieves reliable decision-making with reduced communication overhead, as the system can proceed once the necessary threshold of votes is obtained without needing to coordinate with every single controller.
Data Source
AI summary
Various embodiments distributively control a wind park having a plurality of wind turbines. Each wind turbine controlled by its own turbine controller. Each turbine controller determines power production capability of its dedicated wind turbine. The power production capability of the single wind turbine is communicated with a plurality of other turbine controllers in the wind park. A consensus power distribution schedule to distribute power to a power grid is determined using votes from each turbine controller in the wind park. Energy is discharged from each wind turbine to a power grid according to the power distribution schedule. When one wind turbine fails, a new power distribution schedule is determined using votes from each remaining turbine controller and energy is discharged from each wind turbine to the power grid according to the new power distribution schedule.