Chapters authored
Robust Control Applications to a Wind Turbine-Simulated System
Wind turbine plants are complex dynamic and uncertain processes driven by stochastic inputs and disturbances, as well as different loads represented by gyroscopic, centrifugal and gravitational forces. Moreover, as their aerodynamic models are nonlinear, both modelling and control become challenging problems. On one hand, high-fidelity simulators should contain different parameters and variables in order to accurately describe the main dynamic system behaviour. Therefore, the development of modelling and control for wind turbine systems should consider these complexity aspects. On the other hand, these control solutions have to include the main wind turbine dynamic characteristics without becoming too complicated. The main point of this chapter is thus to provide two practical examples of development of robust control strategies when applied to a simulated wind turbine plant. Experiments with the wind turbine simulator represent the instruments for assessing the main aspects of the developed control methodologies.
Part of the book: Adaptive Robust Control Systems
Fault Diagnosis Techniques for a Wind Turbine System
The fault diagnosis and prognosis of wind turbine systems represent a challenging issue, thus justifying the research topics developed in this work with application to safety-critical systems. Therefore, this chapter addresses these research issues and demonstrates viable techniques of fault diagnosis and condition monitoring. To this aim, the design of the so-called fault detector relies on its estimate, which involves data-driven methods, as they result effective methods for managing partial information of the system dynamics, together with errors, model-reality mismatch and disturbance effects. In particular, the considered data-driven strategies use fuzzy systems and neural networks, which are employed to establish non-linear dynamic links between measurements and faults. The selected prototypes are based on non-linear autoregressive with exogenous input descriptions, since they are able to approximate non-linear dynamic functions with arbitrary degree of accuracy. The capabilities of the designed fault diagnosis schemes are verified via a high-fidelity simulator, which describes the normal and the faulty behaviour of a wind turbine plant. Finally, the robustness and the reliability features of the proposed methods are validated in the presence of uncertainty and disturbance implemented in the wind turbine simulator.
Part of the book: Fault Detection, Diagnosis and Prognosis