A comparative study between a high-gain interconnected observer and an adaptive observer applied to IM-based WECS

This paper is devoted to the investigation of the potentialities of induction motor sensorless strategies in speed control applications. A comparison study is carried out between two observation approaches dedicated to speed control strategies of induction machine (IM)-based wind energy conversion systems (WECS) under parametric variations, such as: i) the adaptive observer approach, which is based on the speed adaptation law and ii) the interconnected observer, that offers robustness and stability of the system with reduced CPU time. The comparison study is achieved considering four performance criteria: stability, robustness with respect to the variations of the machine inductances, robustness with respect to the variations of the machine resistances, feasibility of the torque estimation. It has been found that the introduced interconnected observer exhibits a higher performance than the traditional adaptive one, with respect to the above-cited comparison criteria.