Fuzzy Control Techniques for Energy Conversion Systems: Wind Turbine and Hydroelectric Plants

The interest on the use of renewable energy resources is increasing, especially towards wind and hydro powers, which should be efficiently converted into electric energy via suitable technology tools. To this aim, fuzzy control techniques represent viable strategies that can be employed for this purpose, due to the features of these nonlinear dynamic processes working over a wide range of operating conditions, driven by stochastic inputs, excitations and disturbances. The considered methods were already verified on wind turbine systems, and important advantages may thus derive from the appropriate implementation of the same control schemes for hydroelectric plants. This represents the key point of the work, which provides some guidelines on the design and the application of these control strategies to these energy conversion systems. In fact, it seems that investigations related with both wind and hydraulic energies present a reduced number of common aspects, thus leading to little exchange and share of possible common points. The working conditions of these energy conversion systems will be also taken into account in order to highlight the reliability and robustness characteristics of the developed control strategies, especially interesting for remote and relatively inaccessible location of many installations.