Sensor fault reconstruction for wind turbine benchmark model using a modified sliding mode observer

Abstract

This paper proposes a fault diagnosis scheme applied to a wind turbine system. The technique used is based on a modified sliding mode observer (SMO), which permits the reconstruction of actuator and sensor faults. A wind turbine benchmark with a real sequence of wind speed is exploited to validate the proposed fault detection and diagnosis scheme. Rotor speed, generator speed, blade pitch angle, and generator torque have different orders of magnitude. As a result, the dedicated sensors are susceptible to faults of quite varying magnitudes, and estimating simultaneous sensor faults with accuracy using a classical SMO is difficult. To address this issue, some modifications are made to the classic SMO. In order to test the efficiency of the modified SMO, several sensor fault scenarios have been simulated, first in the case of separate faults and then in the case of simultaneous faults. The simulation results show that the sensor faults are isolated, detected, and reconstructed accurately in the case of separate faults. In the case of simultaneous faults, with the proposed modification of SMO, the faults are precisely isolated, detected, and reconstructed, even though they have quite different amplitudes; thus, the relative gap does not exceed 0.08% for the generator speed sensor fault.