Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Wind Turbines via a Discrete Time Controller with a Disturbance Compensator

This paper develops a fault diagnosis (FD) and fault-tolerant control (FTC) of pitch actuators in wind turbines. This is accomplished by combining a disturbance compensator with a controller, both of which are formulated in the discrete time domain. The disturbance compensator has a dual purpose: to estimate the actuator fault (which is used by the FD algorithm) and to design the discrete time controller to obtain an FTC. That is, the pitch actuator faults are estimated, and then, the pitch control laws are appropriately modified to achieve an FTC with a comparable behavior to the fault-free case. The performance of the FD and FTC schemes is tested in simulations with the aero-elastic code FAST.