Control of wind power supply systems

• Main Author: Tay, Wee Boon.
• Other Authors: Wang Youyi
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Power electronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/40252
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Actual strategies for sustainable energy development have as prior objective the gradual replacement of fossil-fuel-based energy sources by renewable energy ones. Among the clean energy sources, wind energy conversion systems currently carry significant weight in many developed countries. Following continual efforts of the international research community, a mature wind energy conversion technology is now available to sustain the rapid dynamics of concerned investment programs. The main problem regarding wind power systems is the major discrepancy between the irregular character of the primary source (wind speed is a random, strongly non-stationary process, with turbulence and extreme variations) and the taxing demands regarding the electrical energy quality: reactive power, harmonics, flicker, etc. Thus, wind energy conversion within the parameters imposed by the energy market and by technical standards is not possible without the essential contribution of automatic control. Many research works deal with wind power systems control, aiming at optimising the energetic conversion, interfacing wind turbines to the grid and reducing the fatigue load of the mechanical structure. Meanwhile, the gap between the development of advanced control algorithms and their effective use in most of the practical engineering domain is widely recognized. Much work has been and continues to be done, especially by the research community, in order to bridge this gap and ease the technology transfer in control engineering. In this project, a method of tracking the maximum power in a wind energy conversion system is presented. To achieve the maximum power from the wind turbine, a proportional-integral (PI) speed controller is presented which serves to adjust the generator on basis of the measured rotational speed to operate together with the MPPT controller.