A Sensorless and Adaptive Control Strategy for a Wind Turbine Based on the Surface-Mounted Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator and PWM-CSC

Abstract

In order to control, protect and monitor the variable-speed wind turbine generator system, the rotor position sensor and the speed sensor are usually equipped with the system to measure the rotor position and wind speed. However, with the utilisation of these sensors, not only the hardware complexity and the cost increases, but also the reliability of the system impairs. Aiming to solve problems which incurred during using these sensors in the system, this paper presents a sensorless and adaptive control strategy for a wind turbine based on the surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous generators (PMSG). In addition, the pulse-width modulated current source converter (PWM-CSC) is used in the system, which may offer more advantages in the medium size wind turbine. The proposed strategy uses a novel model reference adaptive system (MRAS) as an observer to estimate the rotor position and speed of the PMSG. In general, the PI controller using the method is tuned by trail-and-error. This is tedious and inaccurate and therefore new control algorithms are developed such as model predictive control (MPC). As one of the most effective control techniques for applying in the multi-variable systems control schemes, MPC has been widely implemented to resolve complex control applications. The presented control strategy will be developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment.