Research Article: Electric Control Substituting Pitch Control For Large Wind Turbines
Research Article: Electric Control Substituting Pitch Control For Large Wind Turbines
Research Article: Electric Control Substituting Pitch Control For Large Wind Turbines
Research Article
Electric Control Substituting Pitch Control for
Large Wind Turbines
Copyright 2013 Jon Kjellin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A completely electrical control of a variable speed wind turbine is experimentally verified. A vertical axis wind turbine with a direct
driven generator and an electrical system with diode rectification and full inverter connected to the electric grid is presented. This
is the first paper that presents this novel 200 kW wind power plant erected at the west coast of Sweden. The turbine has fixed pitch
and is only controlled electrically accommodated by passive stall of the blades. By electrically controlling the generator rotational
speed with the inverter, passive stall regulation is enabled. The first results on experimental verification of stall regulation in gusty
wind speeds are presented. The experiments show that the control system can keep the turbine rotational speed constant even at
very gusty winds. It is concluded that electrical control accommodated by passive stall is sufficient as control of the wind turbine
even at high wind speeds and can substitute mechanical control such as blade pitch.
Rectifier Inverter 25
= Grid
Gen AC-filter
20
=
Start 15
1800 Vertical Wind AB, E.ON, Falkenberg Energy and the Swedish
1600
Energy Agency. The Swedish Energy Agency and Vinnova
are acknowledged for contributions to the Swedish Centre for
1400 Renewable Electric Energy Conversion.
1200
1000
References
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600
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as pitching of blades. The electrical system can handle the [7] J. Kjellin, S. Eriksson, P. Deglaire, F. Bulow, and H. Bernhoff,
turbine accommodated by passive stall. The intrinsic stall Progress of control system and measurement techniques for a
control is effectively used by limiting the rotational speed 12 kW vertical axis wind turbine, in Proceedings of the European
before the nominal power has been reached. The result Wind Energy Conference & Exhibition (EWEC 08), Brussels,
implies that as long as the generator voltage can be kept at a Belgium, 2008.
desired level during the entire operating span, no other active [8] J. Kjellin, F. Bulow, S. Eriksson, P. Deglaire, M. Leijon, and H.
storm protection is needed. Instead, the design of the control Bernhoff, Power coefficient measurement on a 12 kW straight
system can be focused towards optimizing power production. bladed vertical axis wind turbine, Renewable Energy, vol. 36,
In addition, this may simplify the control of a wind farm; no. 11, pp. 30503053, 2011.
if the turbines are working against the same DC-bus, the [9] P. Deglaire, Analytical aerodynamic simulation tools for vertical
production can be controlled for the entire farm without axis wind turbines [Ph.D. thesis], Uppsala University, 2010.
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6. Conclusions
The concept with an all-electric control has been demon-
strated. It has been experimentally verified that it is possi-
ble to control the turbine rotational speed in gusty winds
above nominal wind speed without mechanical control. The
rotational speed was kept constant in wind speeds varying
from 8 m/s to 18 m/s. Previous results in [10] state that the
generator is capable of electrically induced stall, which was
verified for the complete wind turbine in this experiment.
Long-time measurements are ongoing to find experimental
- and power-curves for the turbine.
Acknowledgments
This work was conducted within the StandUP for Energy
strategic research framework. Acknowledgments are given to
Journal of Journal of International Journal of
Rotating
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