Fault tolerant control for wind turbine pitch actuators

Abstract

This paper develops a fault detection and isolation (FDI) and active fault tolerant control (FTC) of pitch actuators in wind turbines (WTs). This is accomplished combining a disturbance compensator with a controller, both of which are formulated in the discrete-time domain. The disturbance compensator has a dual purpose: to reconstruct the actuator fault (which is used by the FDI technique) and to design the discrete-time controller to obtain an active FTC. That is, the actuator faults are reconstructed and then the control inputs are modified with the reconstructed fault signal to achieve a FTC in the presence of actuator faults with a comparable behavior to the fault-free case. The proposed techniques are validated using the aeroelastic wind turbine simulator FAST. This software is designed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is widely used for studying wind turbine control systems.