Abstract
Nowadays, large-scale wind power farms (WPFs) bring new challenges for both electric systems and communication networks. Communication networks are an essential part of WPFs because they provide real-time control and monitoring of wind turbines from a remote location (local control center). However, different wind turbine applications have different requirements in terms of data volume, latency, bandwidth, QoS, etc. This paper proposes a hierarchical communication network architecture that consist of a turbine area network (TAN), farm area network (FAN), and control area network (CAN) for offshore WPFs. The two types of offshore WPFs studied are small-scale WPFs close to the grid and medium-scale WPFs far from the grid. The wind turbines are modelled based on the logical nodes (LN) concepts of the IEC 61400-25 standard. To keep pace with current developments in wind turbine technology, the network design takes into account the extension of the LNs for both the wind turbine foundation and meteorological measurements. The proposed hierarchical communication network is based on Switched Ethernet. Servers at the control center are used to store and process the data received from the WPF. The network architecture is modelled and evaluated via OPNET. We investigated the end-to-end (ETE) delay for different WPF applications. The results are validated by comparing the amount of generated sensing data with that of received traffic at servers. The network performance is evaluated, analyzed and discussed in view of end-to-end (ETE) delay for different link bandwidths.
Highlights
Wind power has gained greater attention with respect to sources of renewable energy due to the maturity of the technology and its relative cost competitiveness
To keep pace with current developments in wind turbine technology, we considered the extension of logical nodes (LN) of the wind turbine foundation (WFOU) and meteorological data defined by Nguyen et al [4]
This paper proposes hierarchical communication network architectures for offshore Wind power farms (WPFs)
Summary
Wind power has gained greater attention with respect to sources of renewable energy due to the maturity of the technology and its relative cost competitiveness. The performance of the system with respect to control and monitoring depends mainly on the communication capabilities supporting the exchange of real-time monitoring data between the control centers and the WPFs. Due to the importance of WPF communication infrastructure, the network should be able to continue to work, even in case of device/link failure. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly describes the wind farm configuration and the IEC 61400-25 standard; Section 3 explains the proposed wind power farm communication network; Section 4 presents WPF modeling using OPNET; Section 5 shows the simulation results; and Section 6 presents our conclusion and future work
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