Toward health management and enhanced efficiency in wind turbine farms: Study

Wind farms are locally concentrated clusters of wind turbines that are electrically and commercially tied together. The benefits of wind farms (reducing the average cost due to increasing returns of scale) may become counteracted by the aerodynamic interaction among turbines, which can decrease the total captured energy convertible to electricity. Current utility-scale wind farms include systems for controlling individual turbines and displaying information on the wind farm operation (SCADA). In other various engineering disciplines, novel research into prognostics and diagnostics algorithms is being extensively conducted [4]. The current research interest is extrapolation of these methods to composite blades in wind turbines, and obtaining prognostics signatures in a wind turbine simulator. Correspondingly, the control settings should be changed in response to the health information on the blades, gearbox, bearing, power electronics and motors. The motivation for this work is implementation of a distributed coordinated control concept that takes into account the interaction of wind turbines in a wind farm (aerodynamic coupling effect), as well as health information on the individual blades, bearings, electronics and motors, obtained from a health management algorithm. Distributed fault tolerant control and reconfiguration, based on fault detection/health management concepts, are currently being developed.