Robust Design of ANFIS-Based Blade Pitch Controller for Wind Energy Conversion Systems Against Wind Speed Fluctuations

Wind speed fluctuations and load demand variations represent the big challenges against wind energy conversion systems (WECS). Besides, the inefficient measuring devices and the environmental impacts (e.g. temperature, humidity, and noise signals) affect the system equipment, leading to increased system uncertainty issues. In addition, the time delay due to the communication channels can make a gap between the transmitted control signal and the WECS that causes instability for the WECS operation. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) as an effective control technique for blade pitch control of the WECS instead of the conventional controllers. However, the ANFIS requires a suitable dataset for training and testing to adjust its membership functions in order to provide effective performance. In this regard, this paper also suggests an effective strategy to prepare a sufficient dataset for training and testing of the ANFIS controller. Specifically, a new optimization algorithm named the mayfly optimization algorithm (MOA) is developed to find the optimal parameters of the proportional integral derivative (PID) controller to find the optimal dataset for training and testing of the ANFIS controller. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technique, it is compared with different three algorithms in the literature. Another contribution is that a new time-domain named figure of demerit is established to confirm the minimization of settling time and the maximum overshoot in a simultaneous manner. A lot of test scenarios are performed to confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed ANFIS based technique. The robustness of the proposed method is verified based on the frequency domain conditions that are driven from Hermite-Biehler theorem. The results emphases that the proposed controller provides superior performance against the wind speed fluctuations, load demand variations, system parameters uncertainties, and the time delay of the communication channels.