Model-free active fault-tolerant cooperative control in an offshore wind farm

With respect to the important issue of reliability and availability in wind farms, this paper deals with the development of an integrated fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control scheme in a cooperative framework at wind farm level. The paper presents a novel integrated fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) and fault-tolerant control (FTC) approach oriented to the design and development of an active fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) scheme for an offshore wind farm against the decreased power generation caused by turbine blade erosion and debris build-up on the blades over time. The scheme employs a model-free FDD system to provide accurate and timely diagnosis information to be used in an appropriate automatic signal correction algorithm for accommodation of faults in the farm. Different simulations on a high-fidelity offshore wind farm benchmark model demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme in the presence of wind turbulences, measurement noises and realistic fault scenarios.