Artificial Intelligence-Based Fault Tolerant Control Strategy in Wind Turbine Systems

This is an Open Access article published by ILHAMI COLAK. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.Power converters play an important role as an enabling technology in the electric power industry, especially in Wind Energy Systems (WESs). Where they ensure to regulate the exchanging powers between the system and the grid. Therefore; any fault occurs in any parts of these converters for a limited time without eliminating, it may degrade the system stability and performance. This paper presents a new artificial intelligence-based detection method of open switch faults in power converters connecting doubly-fed induction (DFIG) generator wind turbine systems to the grid. The detection method combines a simple Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy with fuzzy logic and uses rotor current average values to detect the faulty switch in a very short period of time. In addition, following a power switch failure, the FTC strategy activates the redundant leg and restores the operation of the converter. In order to improve the performance of the closed-loop system during transients and faulty conditions, current control is based on a PI (proportional-integral) controller optimized using genetic algorithms. The simulation model was developed in Matlab/Simulink environment and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FTC method and closed-loop current control schemePeer reviewe

Damage investigation of cross-ply flax/epoxy composite under impact fatigue

International audienceThis paper aims at studying the damage evolution of a [0/90] 3S cross-ply flax/epoxy laminate repeatedly impacted at three energy levels of 5, 6 and 7 J. Several specimen plates were prepared by the vacuum infusion technique and then subjected to repeated low-velocity impacts. To assess external damage mechanisms in the impacted plates, an inspection of the back and front faces damage was conducted by using a high-resolution digital reflex camera. Moreover, different techniques were used to evaluate the internal damage such as intensive light exposure, infrared thermal imaging, and computed X-ray tomography. The obtained results show that damage is visible even at low energy level and starts to appear from the first impacts, especially in the back face of the flax/epoxy samples. In addition, after front and back faces cracks appear, delamination is the most predominant damage mechanism that occurs during the different phases of impact fatigue loading. Its size is found to extend with the energy level and the multiplication of impacts