Fault-Tolerant Control of Wind Turbine Systems - A Review

Wind turbine systems are complex and remotely-installed structures which are subject to many possible faults in the existed components. Early fault detection, isolation and successful controller reconfiguration can considerably increase the performance in faulty conditions and prevent abysmal failures in the system. This paper gives an overview of recent progress in theory and methods to analyze and design fault-tolerant control systems for wind turbines. A comparison between model-based and signal based fault detection methods is presented and the contributions in these areas are addressed. The paper is written in a tutorial fashion to summarize some of the recent results in the subject area without going into details. A bibliographical review summarizing the most recent publications is provided to allow interested readers to obtain more detailed information about the recent contributions in Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) and Fault Detection (FD) design for wind turbines.