Reliability improvement of the large-scale wind turbines with actuator faults using a robust fault-tolerant synergetic pitch control

This study addresses the critical issue of enhancing the reliability of large-scale wind turbines in the presence of simultaneous pitch actuator faults. To do this, a fault-tolerant finite-time continuous nonsingular terminal synergetic control manifold is firstly designed and incorporated into the pitch control system to improve precision tracking performance and regulation of the pitch angle for stable power extraction under extreme wind conditions. Besides, the proposed scheme is model-independent, easily accessible, and features fast finite-time convergence. At the same time, the mismatched disturbance observer is designed to attenuate the time-varying perturbations of the wind turbine system (WTS) to achieve robustness and high tracking accuracy. Then, the proposed scheme’s stability conditions and finite-time convergence analysis are derived using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, the simulation and comparative studies are presented to signify the reliable performance of the proposed control method for both a 4.8 MW benchmark WTS and a large-scale 20 MW PMSG-based WTS to verify robustness against simultaneous pitch actuator faults and uncertainties.