Comparison among different crowbar protection techniques for modern wind farms under short circuit occurrence

Abstract

Most of the modern wind farms are based on using Variable Speed Wind Turbines (VSWTs), there are many forms of the construction of VSWTs, Doubly Fed Induction Generators (DFIGs) based wind turbines still the most widely used for its important advantages like variable wind speed tracking performance, lesser losses, and simpler control strategies. Meanwhile, one restriction of DFIG is the operation under heavy faults, DFIG generator is strongly affected by heavy disturbances occurrence, easily disconnected from the grid due to the occurrence of heavy disturbance. The necessary need of increasing the utilization of clean and renewable energy resources especially wind energy, makes an urgent need to increase the DFIG capability of keeping connected with the grid during faults in order to satisfy reliable and safe working of the electrical network. The most widely used crowbar protection techniques are investigated, and a comprehensive comparison between the effectiveness of different crowbar techniques on protecting the DFIG-based wind farms is presented in this work, this comparison has been carried out by simulation on a typical 9 MW DFIG-based wind farm using the MATLAB simpowersystems.