Fault Detection and Load Distribution for the Wind Farm Challenge

In this paper a fault detection system and a fault tolerant controller for a wind farm model is designed and tested. The wind farm model is taken from the wind farm challenge which is a public available challenge where a wind farm consisting of nine turbines is proposed. The goal of the challenge is to detect and handle different faults occurring in the individual turbines on farm level.
The fault detection system is designed such that it takes advantage of the fact that within a wind farm several of the turbines will be operating under similar conditions. To enable this the turbines are grouped into several groups of similar turbines, then the turbines within each group are used to generate residuals for the turbines in the group. The generated residuals are then evaluated using dynamical cumulative sum. The designed fault detection system is cable of detecting all three fault types occurring in the model. All the detections are not within the requirement of the challenge thus room for improvement.

To take advantage of the fault detection system a fault tolerant controller for the wind farm has been designed. The fault tolerant controller is a dispatch controller which is estimating the possible power at each individual turbine, using these estimates to set the reference to the turbines accordingly. The fault tolerant controller has been compared to the reference controller from the challenge. And the fault tolerant controller is better than the reference controller on all measures both under normal and faulty conditions.

Thus a fault detection system and a fault tolerant controller has been designed and combined. The fault tolerant control system has then been tested and compared to the reference system and shows improvement on all measures.