RT22 | Design and Implementation of PMSG based Wind Turbine System using OPAL-RT Digital Controller

In the field of wind power generation, the PMSG-based standalone variable speed wind energy conversion system (VSWECS) has attracted much interest in recent years. Due to its immense advantages, such as gearless construction, absence of external supply for the rotor field, high power density, low noise, high efficiency, and ease of maintenance, the PMSG has been widely used in VSWECS. This paper presents the design and development of PMSG-based VSWECS which uses a diode bridge rectifier along with a dc-dc boost converter. A DC motor-based wind turbine emulator (WTE) is developed to imitate field wind turbine characteristics. The laboratory setup consists of a WTE that is coupled to a three-phase permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) as a standalone system. The WTE and boost converter for the VSWECS are designed and implemented using the OPAL-RT real-time digital controller. The transient and steady-state performance of the designed WTE is all detailed. Also, the conventional Perturb and observe (P&O) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method is applied to extract maximum power for the developed system. The effectiveness of this RT-LAB-based WTE and MPPT control are verified by simulation and experimental results under various wind speed and load change conditions. A significant performance improvement is achieved during steady-state and transient conditions with a better tracking performance. KEYWORDS: DC motor, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG), perturb and observe (P&O), variable speed wind energy conversion system (VSWECS), wind turbine (WT), wind turbine emulator (WTE).