Experimental Analysis of a New Low Power Wind Turbine Emulator Using a DC Machine and Advanced Method for Maximum Wind Power Capture

Abstract

This paper presents a new design of an experimental low power Wind Turbine Emulator (WTE) which has the advantage of being simple and easy to implement in practice. The proposed emulator takes into account the effect of Wind Turbine (WT) inertia as well as the nonlinearities in the system which make it suitable for all types of WTs. An efficient Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPpt) algorithm based on synergetic and backstepping nonlinear control theory has also been proposed to allow the WT to extract maximum power under a wide range of operating conditions. This is achieved by regulating the current at the input of the boost converter through these controllers. Furthermore, these nonlinear controllers considerably reduce the complexity of the design of the control scheme. Several experimental test are conducted to validate the MPPT strategy and the proposed control scheme using a dSPACE1104 board and MATLAB/Simulink environment, including different wind profiles and variable electrical load. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed WTE in reproducing the same mechanical behavior as the real turbine studied and the good performance achieved by the proposed MPPT control algorithm.