Robust wind turbine emulator design using sliding mode controller

摘要

This work deals with the development of a real-time wind turbine emulator (WTE) for laboratory purpose using a robust sliding mode controller (SMC). The application of power electronic converters with various control strategies in machine control facilitate the imitation of a practical wind turbine characteristics using a separately excited DC motor. The SMC theory is used here to develop a control law that governs the system to track the reference current set by the mathematical model of the wind turbine to get the desired output. The static, dynamic characteristics and also the transient responses of the WTE are satisfactorily reproduced by the proposed SMC method. To validate the performance of WTE prototype, it is tested under various operating conditions. A performance comparison of the proposed SMC with the existing proportional and integral (PI) controller in terms of tracking speed, peak overshoot and settling time are discussed in detail. The experimental result analysis confirms that the proposed control scheme improves the imitation of the real-time wind turbine characteristics and performs efficiently under both steady-state and transient conditions.