Abstract

A novel approach for increasing the sustainability and reliability of energy conversion in a wind turbine (WT) system in the presence of uncertainties/disturbances and sensors fault is proposed. To this aim, an active robust fault-tolerant model predictive controller (FT-MPC) is designed for WTs under partial load condition by combining the advantages of the sliding mode observer (SMO) and MPC approaches. Since the WTs are subject to physical/constructive constraints, first, an online MPC is designed to guarantee all constraints satisfaction. Then, the consequences of sensors fault on the control system’s performance are demonstrated. An efficient approach is proposed based on the SMO for estimating the sensors faults and the states simultaneously. The most significant contribution of the observer-based FT-MPC controller is that it is not only robust against uncertainties/disturbances but also using the proposed strategy the challenges of nonlinearity, constraints, and sensor faults can be effectively handled.