Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control in a Wind Farm Using Adaptive Control Reconfiguration and Control Reallocation

High reliability and availability are crucial for cost-effective operation of any wind farm. In this regard, effective schemes for fault detection, diagnosis and accommodation need to be developed to improve the reliability and availability of wind turbines and consequently wind farms (groups of wind turbines). Addressing this issue in a wind farm, this paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant cooperative control scheme based on an adaptive control reconfiguration approach that is augmented with an innovative control reallocation mechanism in a cooperative framework. Applied to a wind farm, this scheme tackles the effects of power loss faults in wind turbines, whether mild (due to mild icing or debris build-up on rotor blades) or severe (due to heavy icing). Different simulations on a wind farm benchmark model indicate the high effectiveness of the proposed scheme.