Power maximization of variable-speed variable-pitch wind turbines using passive adaptive neural fault tolerant control

Power maximization has always been a practical consideration in wind turbines. The question of how to address optimal power capture, especially when the system dynamics are nonlinear and the actuators are subject to unknown faults, is significant. This paper studies the control methodology for variable-speed variable-pitch wind turbines including the effects of uncertain nonlinear dynamics, system fault uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances. The nonlinear model of the wind turbine is presented, and the problem of maximizing extracted energy is formulated by designing the optimal desired states. With the known system, a model-based nonlinear controller is designed; then, to handle uncertainties, the unknown nonlinearities of the wind turbine are estimated by utilizing radial basis function neural networks. The adaptive neural fault tolerant control is designed passively to be robust on model uncertainties, disturbances including wind speed and model noises, and completely unknown actuator faults including generator torque and pitch actuator torque. The Lyapunov direct method is employed to prove that the closed-loop system is uniformly bounded. Simulation studies are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.