Fault Tolerant and Optimal Control of Wind Turbines with Distributed High-Speed Generators

Abstract: In this paper, the control scheme of a distributed high-speed generator system with a total amount of 12 generators and nominal generator speed of 7000 min−1 is studied. Specifically, a fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme is proposed to keep the turbine in operation in the presence of up to four simultaneous generator faults. The proposed controller structure consists of two layers: The upper layer is the baseline controller, which is separated into a partial load region with the generator torque as an actuating signal and the full-load operation region with the collective pitch angle as the other actuating signal. In addition, the lower layer is responsible for the fault diagnosis and FTC characteristics of the distributed generator drive train. The fault reconstruction and fault tolerant control strategy are tested in simulations with several actuator faults of different types.