Design and implementation of wind turbine emulator using FPGA for stand-alone applications

Abstract

In this paper, the design and implementation of a wind turbine emulator for a stand-alone system is presented. There is a need for a testing platform for the wind turbine in order to improve the design and control algorithms. The primary objective of this work is the hardware realisation of a wind energy conversion system to test, control and evaluate the performance of a wind turbine in the laboratory. A separately excited DC motor is designed to act as a wind turbine providing required speed and torque for power generation by a self-excited induction generator using a LabVIEW-based real-time interface. The wind turbine emulator model is simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK platform and is verified experimentally using the FPGA controller. The torque and power response for different wind speeds is analysed and the effectiveness of the emulator is compared with known wind turbine characteristics based on design parameters and the proposed model is validated.