In this paper, an adaptive fault tolerant control strategy is proposed to deal with the three pitch actuator faults in the large-scale wind turbines. Firstly, a simultaneous state and fault estimation was performed through a suitable LMI (linear matrix inequality) based optimal strategy. Hereafter, the new control law is designed using the previously estimated fault information. The actuator efficiency estimator uses as design parameters, respectively, the performance index γ against the wind and the learning rate Ξ. of the fault estimation algorithm. The study shows that the choice of the previous two parameters impacts the response time of the fault estimation and the correlation of the tracking error with the wind. The aim is to choose a small fault estimation response time while keeping a weak correlation between the tracking error and the wind turbulence noise. Finally, a tuning strategy is elaborated to choose the suitable γ and to match the reconfiguration objective.

This paper presents a method to control the rotor speed of wind turbines in presence of gearbox efficiency fault. This kind of faults happens due to lack of lubrication. It affects the dynamic of the principal shaft and thus the rotor speed. The principle of the fault tolerant control is to find a bloc that equalizes the dynamics of the healthy and faulty situations. The effectiveness decrease impacts on not only the dynamics but also the steady state value of the rotor speed. The last reason makes it mandatory to add an integral term on the steady state error to cancel the residual between the measured and operating point rotor speed. The convergence of the method is proven with respect to the rotor parameters and its effectiveness is evaluated through the rotor speed.