Abstract
This paper introduces a control strategy for actively mitigating single-bird collisions with wind turbine blades. The proposed architecture consists of a high-level controller responsible for bird avoidance, interfaced with a wind turbine rotor speed controller on a lower-level. Using an estimation of the time and location of a potential collision in the rotor plane, the bird avoidance problem is formulated as a pointwise-in-time angle tracking problem. Consequently, the controller modifies the speed setpoint to steer the blades to a safe angular position at a given time. The proposed control law fits naturally in a Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) controller synthesis framework with respect to the predicted time-to-collision. The effectiveness of the resulting control law is validated in a numerical simulation environment with the IEA 15 MW reference turbine, showcasing its potential for improving bird safety when provided with reliable bird detection and collision prediction data.