Passive fault tolerant control strategy in controlled wind turbines

In wind turbines (WTs), some faults can induce saturation of the control signal, and these saturation nonlinearities might lead to instability. Therefore, a robust system against saturation can better deal with faults. In this work, an avoid saturation strategy is proposed for the torque control of WTs. The key idea is that the reference power and generator speed set-points are hysterically manipulated. Simulation results from a 5MW benchmark model show that the proposed strategy has a clear added value with respect to the baseline controller not only in healthy condition but also in presence of a realistic fault.