SMARTEOLE is a French national project that was realized between September 2014 and March 2019. It was dedicated to the investigation for innovative control strategies at blade, turbine and farm scale in order to improve the sustainability and profitability of wind energy. It was partially funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and gathered six entities coming from both the academic and industrial field: PRISME laboratory from the University of Orléans (project coordinator), LHEEA from Ecole Centrale de Nantes and CNRS, IFP Energies Nouvelles, ENGIE Green, Leosphere, and LAAS from CNRS.
As already mentioned above, the main objectives of SMARTEOLE are to design innovative control solutions meant to improve the efficiency and the sustainability of the wind turbines. These control solutions are developed at three different scales: the blade, the wind turbine and the wind farm; and they are tested through several experiments realized both in laboratory (wind tunnel) and in the field (several full scale field tests performed in a commercial wind farm).
At blade scale, the objective were to control the aerodynamic performance of the blade through a modification of the pressure distribution (a modification of circulation) with fluidic and/or plasma actuators distributed along the blade.
At wind turbine scale, the objective were to design a feed-forward pitch controller anticipating the incoming wind conditions measured using a nacelle lidar minimizing the loading of the wind turbine, and to confront this new optimized controller with the conventionnal pitch control strategies implemented in the wind turbines used for the field test.
At wind farm scale, new strategies of distributed production are investigated and tested during two field measurement campaigns. The objective is to gain a better understanding of wake interactions between the different wind turbines, and to demonstrate an increase in overall farm production for one or several of the strategies tested. The impact of a possible increased loading of the wind turbines due to these control strategies is also studied.
Three major fields tests were realized in the scope of SMARTEOLE project:
They were held on the wind farm Sole du Moulin Vieux operated by ENGIE Green and located in the North of France. During those heavily instrumented field campaigns, the impact of both axial induction and wake steering control were studied in terms of power production and turbine loading.
The results of SMARTEOLE project were presented during the SMARTEOLE colloquium held at the University campus of Orléans on August 28-30, 2018. It gathered 56 participants coming from all over the world. 27 presentations were shown during those three days.
