Patent ID: 9562516
Date: 2017-02-07
CPC Classifications: F03D,G05B,Y02E

Claim:
1. A control system for a wind turbine, the control system comprising: a local terminal for locally generating wind turbine control commands; a control arrangement for generating control signals for the wind turbine on the basis of the wind turbine control commands; and a switching arrangement for switching between a remote mode of operation over a main communication network, and a local mode of operation over a local communication network between the local terminal and the control arrangement such that a message passed between the local terminal and the control arrangement does not travel beyond that local communication network in the wind turbine; wherein the switching arrangement comprises a physical switch having a first switch position associated with the remote mode of operation and a second switch position associated with the local mode of operation; a virtual local area network switch, wherein the virtual local area network switch is realized to establish at least a main communication network partition and a local communication network partition, wherein the virtual area network switch is configured to ignore or accept commands based on command origin, the first switch position and the second switch position; wherein the control arrangement comprises a Virtual Local Area Network-tagging module for adding a Virtual Local Area Network tag indicating command origin to a data packet passed between the control arrangement and the local terminal; and wherein the addition of the Virtual Local Area Network tag enables control signals to only be passed over a Virtual Local Area Network trunk between the control arrangement and the local terminal.