A novel online controller redesign approach to fault accommodation in wind turbine systems

This paper presents a real-time mechanism to tolerate faults occurring in a Wind Turbine (WT) system. This system is a FAST coded simulator designed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The demonstrated mechanism lies under the taxonomy of Active Fault-tolerant Control (FTC) systems, namely the online redesign based approach. In the proposed approach, we do not use any a priori information about the model of the turbine in real-time. In fact, we use online measurements generated by the WT. Based on the given control specifications, and the observed measurement an occurred fault is accommodated by redesigning the controller online such that the WT generates rated power even under faulty conditions. Secondly, no explicit fault diagnosis (FD) module is used in this approach. As a result, issues of model uncertainty, false alarms, etc. associated with an integrated FD and controller reconfiguration approach to FTC systems are not experienced here.