A Benchmark Evaluation of Fault Tolerant Wind Turbine Control Concepts

As the world’s power supply to a larger and larger degree depends on wind turbines, it is consequently and increasingly important that these are as reliable and available as possible. Modern fault tolerant control (FTC) could play a substantial part in increasing reliability of modern wind turbines. A benchmark model for wind turbine fault detection and isolation, and FTC has previously been proposed. Based on this benchmark, an international competition on wind turbine FTC was announced. In this brief, the top three solutions from that competition are presented and evaluated. The analysis shows that all three methods and, in particular, the winner of the competition shows potential for wind turbine FTC. In addition to showing good performance, the approach is based on a method, which is relevant for industrial usage. It is based on a virtual sensor and actuator strategy, in which the fault accommodation is handled in software sensor and actuator blocks. This means that the wind turbine controller can continue operation as in the fault free case. The other two evaluated solutions show some potential but probably need improvements before industrial applications.