Abstract

Governments across the globe are funding renewable energy initiatives like wind energy to diversify energy resources and promote a greater environmental responsibility. Such an opportunity requires state-of-the-art technologies to realize the required levels of efficiency, reliability, and availability in modern wind turbines. The key enabling technologies for ensuring reliable and efficient operation of modern wind turbines include advanced condition monitoring and diagnosis together with fault-tolerant and efficiency/optimal control. Application of the mentioned technologies in wind turbines constitutes a quite active and, in many aspects, interdisciplinary investigation area that ensures a guaranteed increasing future market for wind energy. In particular, this thesis aims to design and develop novel condition monitoring, diagnosis and fault-tolerant control schemes with application to wind turbines at both individual wind turbine and entire wind farm (i.e., a group of wind turbines) levels. Therefore, the research of the thesis provides advanced levels of monitoring, diagnosis and fault tolerance capabilities to wind turbines in order to ensure their efficient and reliable performance under both fault-free and faulty conditions. Finally, the proposed schemes and strategies are verified by a series of simulations on well-known wind turbine and wind farm benchmark models in the presence of wind turbulences, measurement noises, and different realistic fault scenarios.