Fault tolerant switched reluctance machine for wind turbine blade pitch control

The paper´s goal is to accomplish a study regarding the usefulness of a fault tolerant machine in wind turbine pitch control. The pitch control both helps to catch the wind at the optimal angle of attack of the blade´s airfoil and to turn the blades out of the wind when maximum speed is exceeded. To fulfill this assignment electrical machines are used to control the blade´s pitch angle function of wind´s speed. The faults that can occur in electrical machines can stop the pitch control system, decreasing drastically the efficiency of the wind turbine. Fault tolerance ability of the pitch controlling machines can avoid such issues. In the paper a fault tolerant switched reluctance machine is studied. As it being simple and cheap it is optimal for such vital applications. Numerical field computations were used to analyze the machine´s behavior. An advanced cosimulation was performed by coupling two simulation programs in order to study the machine´s drive system and fault tolerance capacity.