Current and rotor position sensor fault detection and isolation for permanent magnet synchronous generators in wind applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a fault detection and isolation (FDI) method for current and rotor position sensors in the permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) of a wind energy conversion system (WECS). The proposed method detects current sensor faults based on the principle of power conservation, and then isolates the fault using a trigonometric function-based signal estimation algorithm. The rotor position sensor FDI is achieved by combining the current sensor FDI algorithm and a sliding-mode observer (SMO)-based rotor position estimation algorithm. The proposed method does not require additional hardware and is able to detect and isolate multiple sensor faults. The effectiveness of the proposed FDI method is confirmed by simulation results in MATLAB/Simulink and experimental results for a 2.4-kW PMSG-based WECS.