Abstract

Nowadays, large-scale wind power farms (WPFs) bring new challenges for both electrical systems and communication networks. The communication networks represent the essential part in WPF because they provide real time monitoring and control for wind turbines from a remote location (local control center). However, different wind turbine applications have different requirements such as data volume, latency, bandwidth, QoS, etc. This paper proposes hierarchical communication network architectures consisting of a turbine area network (TAN), farm area network (FAN) and control area network (CAN) for offshore WPFs. The wind turbines are modelled based on the logical node (LN) concepts of IEC 61400-25 standard. To keep pace with the current development of wind turbine technology, the network design takes into account the extension of the LNs for both wind turbine foundation and meteorological measurements. The communication network of WPF is configured as a switch-based architecture where each wind turbine has a dedicated link to the wind farm main switch. Servers at the control center are used for storing and processing the received data from WPF. The network architecture is modelled and evaluated by OPNET. We investigated the end-to-end (ETE) delay for different WPF applications. Our network architecture is validated by analyzing the simulation results.

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)

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Summary

Introduction

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

Wind Farm Electric Topology
Wind Farm Communication Topology
IEC 61400-25 Standard
Requirements for the WPF Communication Network
Turbine Area Network
Farm Area Network
Control Area Network
Modeling WPF Communication Network in OPNET
Modeling of Wind Turbine Network
Modeling the Farm Area Network
Modeling of Control Center Network
Performance Metrics
Network Model Validation
End-to-End Delay
Conclusions
Full Text
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