Leakage-detection in blade pitch control systems for wind turbines

The main contribution of the work is a systematic study evaluating the performance of different filters for leakage detection in pitch control systems. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is examined in a Matlab/Simulink real-time environment. The test bed consists of the following elements: hydraulic power unit, servo valve, two leakage bypasses, hydraulic cylinder, payload and xPC-based control system. The filters are tested with the state-augmentation and the hypothesis testing approaches. To our knowledge, the comparison of these different approaches has not been done previously for this type of application. The paper concludes on the accuracy and sensitivity of the leakage detection as well as the computational complexity and the real-time performance.