Robust estimation and diagnosis of wind turbine pitch misalignments at a wind farm level

Abstract

Wind turbine pitch misalignments provoke aerodynamic asymmetries which cause severe damage to the turbine. Hence, it is of interest to develop fault tolerant strategies to cope with pitch misalignments. Fault tolerant strategies require the information regarding the diagnosis and the estimation of the faults. However, most existing works focus only on open-loop misalignment diagnosis and do not provide robust fault estimates. In this work, we present a novel strategy to both estimate and diagnose pitch misalignments. The proposed strategy is developed at a wind farm level and it exploits altogether the information provided by the temporal and spatial relations of the turbines in the farm. Fault estimation is first addressed with a closed-loop switched observer. This observer is robust against disturbances and it adapts to the varying conditions along the wind turbine operation range. Fault diagnosis is then achieved via statistical-based decision mechanisms with adaptive thresholds. Both the observer and the decision mechanisms are designed to guarantee the desired performance. Introducing some restrictions over the number of simultaneous faulty turbines in the farm, the proposed approach is ameliorated via a bank of the aforementioned observers and decision mechanisms. Finally, the strategies are tested using a well-known wind farm benchmark.

Optimal Fault Tolerant Control of Large-Scale Wind Turbines in the Case of the Pitch Actuator Partial Faults

“…e fault isolation and tolerant control applied to the wind turbines has been illustrated in many papers. For example, in [32,33], a codesign of the observers and decision mechanisms for satisfying certain trade-off between different isolation performance indices has been established. e performance indices were the false isolation rates, the isolation times, and the minimum size of the isolable faults.…”

“…Figures 6(c) and 6(d) show the result of fault estimation in that case. In the proposed strategy, by only tuning the learning rate to suitable higher values, the faults with dynamics faster than the system dynamics could be reconfigured without need to redesign the fault estimate algorithm as recommended in [33]. e amplitude of the fault is 0.1 and the frequency is 12 rad/s higher than 9.49 rad/s of the blades.…”

Fault tolerant control of wind turbine via identified fuzzy models prototypes

“…The system consists of three identical actuators in Figure (1), each actuator has an internal controller [5,11]. From now on, it describes only a single actuator.…”

Fault Detection for Pitch System of Wind Turbine-Driven Doubly Fed Based on IHHO-LightGBM

“…Failure of pitch bearing would cause the machine to stop [5]. Pitch misalignment could cause performance worsening, undesired rotor loads, and severe damage of the turbine [6][7][8]. Once the propeller system fails, the downtime will be prolonged and the reliability of the wind turbine will be reduced, which will cause serious production losses [9].…”