Sensor Fault Tolerant Control in Modern and Green Power Applications: A Review

Modern power applications have grown leaps and bounds in various applications spanning from domestic to commercial and industrial applications. The operation of these applications is maintained in general by the employment of feedback-based control architectures in place oriented toward delivering certain control objectives. The reliable operation of such applications is extremely dependent on the quality of feedback in the control architectures. Sensors play a crucial role in providing feedback of different quantities as per the requirement of the control architecture. Any loss in the quality of sensing greatly hinders the feedback quality and, therefore, the control performance of the system. Sensors in general can be vulnerable and might be prone to malfunctions or faults. In such situations of sensor malfunctions, it is highly necessary to preserve the system performance to ensure seamless operation. Fault tolerant control (FTC) strategies are found to be very effective in maintaining the system’s performance even in the presence of sensor faults. This work is, therefore, oriented toward presenting an extensive review and bringing together various FTC approaches reported in the literature for handling sensor faults in the context of modern power applications. Different types of sensor fault scenarios as well as different categories of FTC techniques are also discussed. The modern power applications considered as a part of this work are motor drives, renewable energy and storage systems, and microgrids. This work tries to summarize these contributions effectively and also discusses the possible scope of future research in these lines.