Model-Based Active Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control in An Offshore Wind Farm

Given the importance of reliability and availability in wind farms, this paper focuses on the development of an integrated fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control scheme in a cooperative framework at wind farm level against the decreased power generation caused by turbine blade erosion and debris build-up on the blades over time. More precisely, the paper presents a novel integrated fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) and fault-tolerant control (FTC) approach oriented to the design and development of an active fault-tolerant cooperative control (AFTCC) scheme for an offshore wind farm. The scheme employs a fault detection and diagnosis system to provide accurate and timely diagnosis information to be used in an appropriate automatic signal correction algorithm for accommodation of faults in the farm. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme are evaluated and analyzed by different simulations on a high-fidelity offshore wind farm benchmark model in the presence of wind turbulences, measurement noises and realistic fault scenarios. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.