Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control Design Approach for a Wind Turbine Benchmark

This paper addresses the development of an active fault tolerant control scheme that is applied to a wind turbine simulated benchmark. The proposed methodology is based on a comprehensive scheme relying on adaptive controllers designed by means of the on-line identification of the system model under diagnosis. In this way, the controller reconfiguration mechanism exploits an adaptive regulator implementation, depending on the on--line estimate of system model. One of the advantages of this strategy is that, for example, the original structure of logic-based switching digital controller scheme already implemented for the wind turbine benchmark can be almost preserved. The active fault tolerant control scheme is therefore applied to a wind turbine simulated benchmark, in the presence of disturbance and measurement errors, along nominal operating conditions, including also different realistic fault situations. The achieved results in both fault-free and faulty conditions serve to show the enhancement of the control performances, and the fault accommodation features.