Active Fault Tolerant Control of a Wind Farm System

Abstract

In order to enhance the ‘sustainability’ of offshore wind farms, thus skipping unplanned maintenance operations and costs, that can be important for offshore systems, the earlier management of faults represents the key point. Therefore, this work studies the development of an adaptive sustainable control scheme with application to a wind farm benchmark consisting of nine wind turbine systems. They are described via their nonlinear models, as well as the wind and wake effects among the wind turbines of the wind park. The fault tolerant control strategy uses the recursive estimation of the faults provided by nonlinear estimators designed via a nonlinear differential algebraic tool. This aspect of the study, together with the more straightforward solution based on a data-driven scheme, is the key issue when on-line applications are proposed for a viable implementation of the proposed solutions.