Comparative Investigations of Sensor Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies Performance for Marine Current Turbine Applications

This paper deals with the issue of marine renewable energy conversion systems resilience. Indeed, resilience or fault tolerance is a critical issue due to the weather-dependent offshore site intervention and the high induced maintenance costs. In this context, this paper proposes to address sensors failure tolerance in the case of marine current turbine applications. In particular, comparative investigations are proposed to assess sensor fault-tolerant control strategies performance in terms of efficiency (energy criterion), torque ripples (marine current turbine shaft fatigue), computational cost, and robustness against parameters variations. The proposed comparative investigations are based on extensive simulations carried out on a direct drive fixed-pitch marine current turbine based on a permanent magnet synchronous generator. These simulations consider real tidal speed at the Raz de Sein site in Bretagne, France. The achieved simulations results and the derived conclusions are supposed to propose guidelines for the choice of the most adapted fault-tolerant strategy depending on the marine current turbine parameters availability and the user expectations.