Active actuator fault-tolerant control of a wind turbine benchmark model

This paper describes the design of an active fault-tolerant control scheme that is applied to the actuator of a wind turbine benchmark. The methodology is based on adaptive filters obtained via the nonlinear geometric approach, which allows to obtain interesting decoupling property with respect to uncertainty affecting the wind turbine system. The controller accommodation scheme exploits the on-line estimate of the actuator fault signal generated by the adaptive filters. The nonlinearity of the wind turbine model is described by the mapping to the power conversion ratio from tip-speed ratio and blade pitch angles. This mapping represents the aerodynamic uncertainty, and usually is not known in analytical form, but in general represented by approximated two-dimensional maps (i.e. look-up tables). Therefore, this paper suggests a scheme to estimate this power conversion ratio in an analytical form by means of a two-dimensional polynomial, which is subsequently used for designing the active fault-tolerant control scheme. The wind turbine power generating unit of a grid is considered as a benchmark to show the design procedure, including the aspects of the nonlinear disturbance decoupling method, as well as the viability of the proposed approach. Extensive simulations of the benchmark process are practical tools for assessing experimentally the features of the developed actuator fault-tolerant control scheme, in the presence of modelling and measurement errors. Comparisons with different fault-tolerant schemes serve to highlight the advantages and drawbacks of the proposed methodology

Adaptive Signal Processing Strategy for a Wind Farm System Fault Accommodation

In order to improve the availability of offshore wind farms, thus avoiding unplanned operation and maintenance costs, which can be high for offshore installations, the accommodation of faults in their earlier occurrence is fundamental. This paper addresses the design of an active fault tolerant control scheme that is applied to a wind park benchmark of nine wind turbines, based on their nonlinear models, as well as the wind and interactions between the wind turbines in the wind farm. Note that, due to the structure of the system and its control strategy, it can be considered as a fault tolerant cooperative control problem of an autonomous plant. The controller accommodation scheme provides the on-line estimate of the fault signals generated by nonlinear filters exploiting the nonlinear geometric approach to obtain estimates decoupled from both model uncertainty and the interactions among the turbines. This paper proposes also a data-driven approach to provide these disturbance terms in analytical forms, which are subsequently used for designing the nonlinear filters for fault estimation. This feature of the work, followed by the simpler solution relying on a data-driven approach, can represent the key point when on-line implementations are considered for a viable application of the proposed scheme

Robust nonlinear control of vectored thrust aircraft

An interdisciplinary program in robust control for nonlinear systems with applications to a variety of engineering problems is outlined. Major emphasis will be placed on flight control, with both experimental and analytical studies. This program builds on recent new results in control theory for stability, stabilization, robust stability, robust performance, synthesis, and model reduction in a unified framework using Linear Fractional Transformations (LFT's), Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI's), and the structured singular value micron. Most of these new advances have been accomplished by the Caltech controls group independently or in collaboration with researchers in other institutions. These recent results offer a new and remarkably unified framework for all aspects of robust control, but what is particularly important for this program is that they also have important implications for system identification and control of nonlinear systems. This combines well with Caltech's expertise in nonlinear control theory, both in geometric methods and methods for systems with constraints and saturations

A review of convex approaches for control, observation and safety of linear parameter varying and Takagi-Sugeno systems

This paper provides a review about the concept of convex systems based on Takagi-Sugeno, linear parameter varying (LPV) and quasi-LPV modeling. These paradigms are capable of hiding the nonlinearities by means of an equivalent description which uses a set of linear models interpolated by appropriately defined weighing functions. Convex systems have become very popular since they allow applying extended linear techniques based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to complex nonlinear systems. This survey aims at providing the reader with a significant overview of the existing LMI-based techniques for convex systems in the fields of control, observation and safety. Firstly, a detailed review of stability, feedback, tracking and model predictive control (MPC) convex controllers is considered. Secondly, the problem of state estimation is addressed through the design of proportional, proportional-integral, unknown input and descriptor observers. Finally, safety of convex systems is discussed by describing popular techniques for fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control (FTC).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Path-wise control of stochastic systems: overcoming the curse of causality

In this thesis we address the topic of path-wise control of stochastic systems defined by stochastic differential equations. By path-wise control we mean that the controller's decisions are not intended to regulate the moments of the state or the output (or a function of them), as customary in stochastic control. Instead, we aim at designing a controller that achieves a desired, specific, trajectory of the state (or the output) itself, for all possible realisations of the noise affecting the system. We show that path-wise control is cursed by insuperable causality issues, because in order to perfectly attain a predefined trajectory for each realisation of the noise, the controller needs to access measurements of the noise itself, which is not possible in practice. Therefore, we approach path-wise control in two steps. Firstly, we design idealistic controllers, which achieve exact regulation by employing a feedback of the noise. Although unrealistic, these designs are preliminary to the second step, i.e. the construction of practical controllers, which estimate the noise from measurements of available quantities (state or output) and use such estimates to perform approximate path-wise control in a hybrid way. We show that the performance of the practical controllers can retrieve the idealistic ones in a limit behaviour. In this framework we address two classical control problems. Firstly, we consider output regulation of linear stochastic systems. We show that the idealistic controllers achieve a zero steady-state tracking error, while the practical controllers allow for a nonzero steady-state error, which, however, can be made arbitrarily small by tuning a design parameter. Secondly, we consider the control of stochastic systems defined by nonlinear, control-affine, stochastic differential equations. In this case, we show that the idealistic controllers achieve exact feedback linearisation and output tracking, while the practical controllers achieve state (and output) trajectories which can be made close to the idealistic ones by tuning a design parameter, thus obtaining approximate feedback linearisation and tracking.Open Acces

Robust converter-fed motor control based on active rejection of multiple disturbances

In this work, an advanced motion controller is proposed for buck converter-fed DC motor systems. The design is based on an idea of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with its key component being a custom observer capable of reconstructing various types of disturbances (including complex, harmonic signals). A special formulation of the proposed design allows the control action to be expressed in a concise and practically appealing form reducing its implementation requirements. The obtained experimental results show increased performance of the introduced approach over conventionally used methods in tracking precision and disturbance rejection, while keeping similar level of energy consumption. A stability analysis using theory of singular perturbation further supports the validity of proposed control approach.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl