Passive Fault-tolerant Cooperative Control in an Offshore Wind Farm

Abstract

The rapid growth in size and capacity of wind turbines together with harsh climate conditions and limited accessibility in offshore regions all result in higher failure rates and increased maintenance requirements and costs. Such difficulties motivate the use of advanced fault detection and diagnosis as well as fault-tolerant control schemes in wind farms to improve their reliability and availability. Given the importance of this issue, the current paper employs a fuzzy model reference adaptive control approach in a cooperative framework that is oriented to the design and development of a novel passive fault-tolerant cooperative control scheme in a wind farm. This scheme handles decreased power generation faults in a wind farm caused by turbine blade erosion and debris buildup on the blades over time. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by a series of simulations on an advanced large off-shore wind farm benchmark model.