Robust Actuator Fault Diagnosis of a Wind Turbine Benchmark Model

This paper describes the design of a robust fault diagnosis scheme that is applied to the actuators of a wind turbine benchmark. The methodology is based on adaptive filters obtained via a nonlinear geometric approach, which allows to obtain interesting decoupling property with respect to uncertainty affecting the wind turbine system. The residual generation scheme exploits the on–line estimation of the actuator fault signal generated by the adaptive filters. The nonlinearity of the wind turbine model is described by the mapping to the power conversion ratio from tip–speed ratio and blade pitch angles, usually not known in analytical form. The wind turbine unit is considered as benchmark to show the design procedure, including the aspects of the nonlinear disturbance decoupling method, as well as the viability of the proposed approach. Extensive simulations of the benchmark process are practical tools for assessing experimentally the features of the developed actuator fault diagnosis scheme, in the presence of modelling and measurement errors.