Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control of Large-Scale Wind Farms and Wind Farm Clusters

Abstract

Large-scale wind farms and wind farm clusters with many installed wind turbines are increasingly built around the world, and especially in offshore regions. The reliability and availability of these assets are critically important for cost-effective wind power generation. This requires effective solutions for online fault detection, diagnosis and fault accommodation to improve the overall reliability and availability of wind turbines and entire wind farms. To meet this requirement, this paper proposes a novel active fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) scheme for large-scale wind farms and wind farm clusters (WFCs). The proposed scheme is based on a signal correction method at wind turbine level that is augmented with two innovative “control reallocation” mechanisms at wind farm and network operator levels. Applied to a WFC, this scheme detects, identifies and accommodates the effects of both mild and severe power-loss faults in wind turbines. Various simulation studies on an advanced WFC benchmark indicate the high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solutions.