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.