A Novel Approach to Real-Time Fault Accommodation in NREL´s 5-MW Wind Turbine Systems

This paper presents a real-time mechanism to tolerate faults occurring in a wind turbine (WT) system. This system is a FAST coded simulator designed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory´s (NREL´s) National Wind Turbine Center. The demonstrated mechanism lies under the taxonomy of active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) systems, namely the projection-based approach. In the proposed approach, we do not use any a priori information about the model of the turbine in real-time. In fact, we use the online measurements generated by WT. Based on the given control objectives, and the observed measurements, an occurring fault is accommodated by reconfiguring the controller such that the turbine generates the rated power even under faulty conditions. Second, no use of an explicit fault-diagnosis module is seen in this approach. Therefore, the fault accommodation delay in the proposed AFTC structure is smaller than the delay as experienced in the traditional structure of AFTC systems.