Control allocation based compensation for faulty blade actuator of wind turbine

A blade and pitch system plays the key role in the control of optimal power production with a wind turbine. Any fault with a blade actuator can cause a significant error in pitch position of the corresponding blade. This problem may result in the insufficient torque so that the power reference cannot be achieved. In this paper, a control allocation technique is employed for compensating the effect of faulty blade actuator. Control allocation is one of the most commonly used fault-tolerant control techniques especially for over-actuated systems. This paper presents a control allocation based method to achieve the power reference even in the event of blade actuator fault by redistributing the lost torque due to erroneous pitch position into non-faulty blade actuators. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulations with a benchmark model of the wind turbine.