Robust fault estimation in wind turbine systems using GA optimisation

Wind turbine system is a safety-critical system, which has the demand to improve the operating reliability and reducing the cost caused by the shut-down time and component repairing. As a result, condition monitoring and fault diagnosis have received much attention for wind turbine energy systems. Noticing that environmental disturbances are unavoidable, therefore how to improve the robustness of a fault diagnosis scheme against disturbances/noises has been a key issue in fault diagnosis community. In this investigation, a robust fault estimation approach with the aid of eigenstructure assignment and genetic algorithm (GA) optimization is presented so that the estimation error dynamics has a good robustness against disturbances. A simulation study is carried out for a 5MW wind turbine dynamic model, which has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.