Model reference adaptive fault-tolerant control with application to wind turbines

This paper presents a model-reference adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme for a class of nonlinear systems. Robust adaptive control algorithms are derived without the need for precise system parameters or analytical bound estimation on actuator failure variables. The overall control scheme has simpler structure and demand less online computations as compared with most existing methods. The proposed strategy is applied to individual pitch control of wind turbines where each blade of the wind turbine is controlled independently to track the corresponding reference signal in the presence of actuator fault and modeling uncertainties. Formative analysis and simulation on various failure scenarios confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.