Power switch and current sensor fault-tolerant control of PMSG drives for wind turbine systems

Fault-diagnosis and fault-tolerant control of modern wind turbines with minimum hardware requirements are mandatory features in order to increase the reliability and availability levels with low costs. This paper presents a fault-tolerant permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) drive for wind turbine systems, allowing to automatically reconfigure the drive operation when a current sensor fault and a power switch open-circuit failure in the back-to-back converter occurs. Accordingly, the fault can be distinguished and the faulty device is correctly localized in both cases, based on a single fault diagnostic technique. For the power switch post-fault operation, a fault-tolerant converter topology is proposed with minimum number of extra components and with a simple control modification. In addition, an effective algorithm is proposed for current sensor post-fault operation without using extra devices. In order to prove the performance of the proposed fault-tolerant PMSG drive, several simulation results are presented.