Fault tolerant control design of floating offshore wind turbines

This work is concerned with active vibration mitigation in wind turbines (WT) but not through the use of specifically tailored devices. Instead, a general control scheme is designed for torque and pitch controllers based on a super-twisting algorithm, which uses additional feedback of the fore-aft and side-to-side acceleration signals at the top of the WT tower to mitigate the vibrational behavior. In general, proposed methods to improve damping through pitch and torque control suffer from increased blade pitch actuator usage. However, in this work the blade pitch angle is smoothed leading to a decrease of the pitch actuator effort, among other benefits evidenced through numerical experiments. The most frequent faults induce vibrations in the corresponding WT subsystems. In fact, vibration monitoring has been recently used for fault diagnosis Thus, by means of vibration mitigation, different faulty conditions can be alleviated leading to a passive fault tolerant control. In this work, coupled non-linear aero-hydro- servo-elastic simulations of a floating offshore wind turbine are carried out for one of the most common pitch actuator faults.Postprint (published version

Design of set-point weighting-based dynamic integral sliding mode control with nonlinear full-order state observers for quadcopter UAVs

Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. This research is to develop set-point weighting-based dynamic integral sliding mode control with nonlinear full-order state observers to deal with nonlinear and underactuated coupled systems, and unforeseen circumstances of quadcopter UAVs systems. A comparative assessment through numerical simulations of sliding mode-based nonlinear observer approaches and Kalman filter is presented. These include quasi method, interval type-2 fuzzy logic system, super-twisting algorithm, higher order sliding mode observer, and extended Kalman filter. Chattering, noise rejection, estimation error and time required to track true states are evaluated to demonstrate the performance of each observer. In addition, to assess the proposed controller performance, maximum overshoot, rise time, chattering, and steady-state error are evaluated in relation to the use of each observer

Acceleration-based fault-tolerant control design of offshore fixed wind turbines

Wind turbines (WTs) are basically controlled by varying the generator load torque (with the so-called torque control) and the blade pitch angles (with the so-called pitch control) based on measurement of the generator shaft speed. These two controllers unitedly work to satisfy the control objectives, and it is crucial that they are tolerant to possible faults in the WT system. Passive fault-tolerant control comprises the design of robust controllers against disturbances and uncertainties. This enables the controller to counteract the effect of a fault without requiring reconfiguration or fault detection. In this regard, the main contribution of this paper is to propose new control techniques that not only provide fault tolerance capabilities to the WT system but also improve the overall performance of the system in both fault-free and faulty conditions. Coupling nonlinear aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulations of an offshore WT with jacket platform is carried out for several pitch actuator faults. The jacket platform motions and structural loads caused by fault events with the proposed controllers are compared with loads encountered during normal operation and with respect to a well-known baseline controller in the literature. The proposed controllers are based in the super-twisting algorithm by using feedback of the generator shaft speed as well as the fore-aft and side-to-side acceleration signals of the WT tower.Preprin

Robust exact differentiators with predefined convergence time

The problem of exactly differentiating a signal with bounded second derivative is considered. A class of differentiators is proposed, which converge to the derivative of such a signal within a fixed, i.e., a finite and uniformly bounded convergence time. A tuning procedure is derived that allows to assign an arbitrary, predefined upper bound for this convergence time. It is furthermore shown that this bound can be made arbitrarily tight by appropriate tuning. The usefulness of the procedure is demonstrated by applying it to the well-known uniform robust exact differentiator, which the considered class of differentiators includes as a special case