FUZZY MODELLING AND IDENTIFICATION FOR SUSTAINABLE CONTROL DESIGN OF AN OFFSHORE WIND FARM

In order to improve the safety, the reliability, and the efficiency of offshore wind park installations, thus avoiding expensive unplanned maintenance, the accommodation of faults in their earlier occurrence is fundamental. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper consists of the development of a fault tolerant (the so-called ‘sustainable’) control scheme by means of a data-driven approach. In particular, this strategy based on fuzzy model identification is exploited for deriving the mathematical description of the required controller. Fuzzy theory is exploited here since it is able to approximate easily unknown nonlinear systems and manage noisy measurements. Moreover, the fuzzy controller, which is directly identified from the wind farm measurements, provides the straightforward achievement of the fault tolerance feature. In general, an analytic approach, where the system nonlinearity is explicitly taken into account, could require more complex design methodologies. This aspect of the work, followed by the simpler solution relying on fuzzy rules, represents the key point when on-line implementations are considered of the proposed control scheme. To highlight the potential of the proposed fault tolerant control scheme in real applications, a Hardware–In–the–Loop test facility representing a realistic offshore wind farm installation is considered to analyse the digital implementation of the designed controller. The achieved results show that the developed scheme maintains desired performances, thus validating its reliability and viability also in real-time implementations.