Small-Signal Modelling and Analysis of Doubly-Fed Induction Generators in Wind Power Applications

The worldwide demand for more diverse and greener energy supply has had a significant impact on the development of wind energy in the last decades. From 2 GW in 1990, the global installed capacity has now reached about 100 GW and is estimated to grow to 1000 GW by 2025. As wind power penetration increases, it is important to investigate its effect on the power system. Among the various technologies available for wind energy conversion, the doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) is one of the preferred solutions because it offers the advantages of reduced mechanical stress and optimised power capture thanks to variable speed operation. This work presents the small-signal modelling and analysis of the DFIG for power system stability studies. This thesis starts by reviewing the mathematical models of wind turbines with DFIG convenient for power system studies. Different approaches proposed in the literature for the modelling of the turbine, drive-train, generator, rotor converter and external power system are discussed. It is shown that the flexibility of the drive train should be represented by a two-mass model in the presence of a gearbox. In the analysis part, the steady-state behaviour of the DFIG is examined. Comparison is made with the conventional synchronous generators (SG) and squirrel-cage induction generators to highlight the differences between the machines. The initialisation of the DFIG dynamic variables and other operating quantities is then discussed. Various methods are briefly reviewed and a step-by-step procedure is suggested to avoid the iterative computations in initial condition mentioned in the literature. The dynamical behaviour of the DFIG is studied with eigenvalue analysis. Modal analysis is performed for both open-loop and closed-loop situations. The effect of parameters and operating point variations on small signal stability is observed. For the open-loop DFIG, conditions on machine parameters are obtained to ensure stability of the system. For the closed-loop DFIG, it is shown that the generator electrical transients may be neglected once the converter controls are properly tuned. A tuning procedure is proposed and conditions on proportional gains are obtained for stable electrical dynamics. Finally, small-signal analysis of a multi-machine system with both SG and DFIG is performed. It is shown that there is no common mode to the two types of generators. The result confirms that the DFIG does not introduce negative damping to the system, however it is also shown that the overall effect of the DFIG on the power system stability depends on several structural factors and a general statement as to whether it improves or detriorates the oscillatory stability of a system can not be made

Modal Analysis of Grid Connected Doubly-Fed Induction Generators

This paper presents the modal analysis of a gridconnected doubly fed induction generator (DFIG). The change in modal properties for different system parameters, operating points, and grid strengths are computed and observed. The results offer a better understanding of theDFIG intrinsic dynamics,which can also be useful for control design and model justification. Index Terms—Doubly fed induction generator, eigenvalue analysis, nonlinear dynamic model, small-signal stability.Published versio

Full- & Reduced-Order State-Space Modeling of Wind Turbine Systems with Permanent-Magnet Synchronous Generator

Wind energy is an integral part of nowadays energy supply and one of the fastest growing sources of electricity in the world today. Accurate models for wind energy conversion systems (WECSs) are of key interest for the analysis and control design of present and future energy systems. Existing control-oriented WECSs models are subject to unstructured simplifications, which have not been discussed in literature so far. Thus, this technical note presents are thorough derivation of a physical state-space model for permanent magnet synchronous generator WECSs. The physical model considers all dynamic effects that significantly influence the system's power output, including the switching of the power electronics. Alternatively, the model is formulated in the $(a,b,c)$- and $(d,q)$-reference frame. Secondly, a complete control and operation management system for the wind regimes II and III and the transition between the regimes is presented. The control takes practical effects such as input saturation and integral windup into account. Thirdly, by a structured model reduction procedure, two state-space models of WECS with reduced complexity are derived: a non-switching model and a non-switching reduced-order model. The validity of the models is illustrated and compared through a numerical simulation study.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figure

Modeling and Control of a Doubly-Fed Induction Generator for Wind Turbine-Generator Systems

Wind energy plays an increasingly important role in the world because it is friendly to the environment. During the last decades, the concept of a variable-speed wind turbine (WT) has been receiving increasing attention due to the fact that it is more controllable and efficient, and has good power quality. As the demand of controllability of variable speed WTs increases, it is therefore important and necessary to investigate the modeling for wind turbine-generator systems (WTGS) that are capable of accurately simulating the behavior of each component in the WTGS. Therefore, this thesis will provide detailed models of a grid-connected wind turbine system equipped with a doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG), which includes the aerodynamic models of the wind turbine, the models of the mechanical transmission system, the DFIG models and the three-phase two-level PWM voltage source converter models. In order to obtain satisfying output power from the WTGS, control strategies are also necessary to be developed based on the previously obtained WTGS models. These control schemes include the grid-side converter control, the generator-side converter control, the maximum power point tracking control and the pitch angle control. The grid-side converter controller is used to keep the DC-link voltage constant and yield a unity power factor looking into the WTGS from the grid-side. The generator-side converter controller has the ability of regulating the torque, active power and reactive power. The maximum power point tracking control is used to provide the reference values for the active power at the stator terminals. The pitch angle control scheme is used to regulate the pitch angle and thus keep the output power at rated value even when the wind speed experiences gusts. Various studies in the literature have reported that two-level converters have several disadvantages compared with three-level converters. Among the disadvantages are high switching losses, high dv/dt, and high total harmonic distortion (THD). Hence, the models and field oriented control schemes for three-level neutral-point-clamped (NPC) converters are also investigated and applied to a WTGS. Besides, an advanced modulation technology, namely, space vector PWM (SVPWM), is also investigated and compared to traditional sinusoidal PWM in a WTGS

Oscillatory Stability and Eigenvalue Sensitivity Analysis of A DFIG Wind Turbine System

2010-2011 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journa

Modelling and Stability Analysis of Brushless Doubly Fed Generators

The brushless doubly-fed machine (BDFM) continues to attract increasing interest for applications in wind generation where, robustness and low servicing costs are its principles advantages. The construction aspect of the BDFM has been widely studied and currently this machine can be build with good performances. However, the control aspect remains difficult to achieve and some studies show that the BDFM is less stable than the doubly-fed induction machine. To explore the BDFM stability in all operating mode, this paper proposes a stability analysis of a grid-connected variable speed wind turbine-based BDFM. For this purpose, a linearized small signals mathematical model is proposed which takes into account both grid and control disturbances. Then, the effect of electrical parameters variation and operating speed change on the stability of the BDFM has been studied. The stability has been investigated through simulation implementation. The obtained results demonstrate the validity and the superiority of the proposed model

Improved Wind Turbine Control Strategies for Maximizing Power Output and Minimizing Power Flicker

For reducing the cost of energy (COE) for wind power, controls techniques are important for enhancing energy yield, reducing structural load and improving power quality. This thesis presents the control strategies studies for wind turbine both from the perspectives of both maximizing power output and reducing power flicker and structural load, First, a self-optimizing robust control scheme is developed with the objective of maximizing the power output of a variable speed wind turbine with doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) operated in Region 2. Wind power generation can be divided into two stages: conversion from aerodynamic power to rotor (mechanical) power and conversion from rotor power to the electrical (grid) power. In this work, the maximization of power generation is achieved by a two-loop control structure in which the power control for each stage has intrinsic synergy. The outer loop is an Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) based generator torque regulation via the rotor power feedback. The ESC can search for the optimal torque constant to maximize the rotor power without wind measurement or accurate knowledge of power map. The inner loop is a vector-control based scheme that can both regulate the generator torque requested by the ESC and also maximize the conversion from the rotor power to grid power. In particular, an ∞ controller is synthesized for maximizing, with performance specifications defined based upon the spectrum of the rotor power obtained by the ESC. Also, the controller is designed to be robust against the variations of some generator parameters. The proposed control strategy is validated via simulation study based on the synergy of several software packages including the TurbSim and FAST developed by NREL, Simulink and SimPowerSystems. Then, a bumpless transfer scheme is proposed for inter-region controller switching scheme in order to reduce the power fluctuation and structural load under fluctuating wind conditions. This study considers the division of Region 2, Region 2.5 and Region 3 in the neighborhood of the rated wind speed. When wind, varies around the rated wind speed, the switching of control can lead to significant fluctuation in power and voltage supply, as well as structural loading. To smooth the switch and improve the tracking, two different bumpless transfer methods, Conditioning and Linear Quadratic techniques, are employed for different inter-region switching situations. The conditioning bumpless transfer approach adopted for switching between Region 2 maximum power capture controls to Region 2.5 rotor speed regulation via generator torque. For the switch between Region 2.5 and Region 3, the generator torque windup at rated value and pitch controller become online to limit the load of wind turbine. LQ technique is posed to reduce the discontinuity at the switch between torque controller and pitch controller by using an extra compensator. The flicker emission of the turbine during the switching is calculated to evaluate power fluctuation. The simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme of inter-region switching, with significant reduction of power flicker as well as the damage equivalent load

Voltage Stability Analysis of Grid-Connected Wind Farms with FACTS: Static and Dynamic Analysis

Recently, analysis of some major blackouts and failures of power system shows that voltage instability problem has been one of the main reasons of these disturbances and networks collapse. In this paper, a systematic approach to voltage stability analysis using various techniques for the IEEE 14-bus case study, is presented. Static analysis is used to analyze the voltage stability of the system under study, whilst the dynamic analysis is used to evaluate the performance of compensators. The static techniques used are Power Flow, V–P curve analysis, and Q–V modal analysis. In this study, Flexible Alternating Current Transmission system (FACTS) devices- namely, Static Synchronous Compensators (STATCOMs) and Static Var Compensators (SVCs) - are used as reactive power compensators, taking into account maintaining the violated voltage magnitudes of the weak buses within the acceptable limits defined in ANSI C84.1. Simulation results validate that both the STATCOMs and the SVCs can be effectively used to enhance the static voltage stability and increasing network loadability margin. Additionally, based on the dynamic analysis results, it has been shown that STATCOMs have superior performance, in dynamic voltage stability enhancement, compared to SVCs

Control Studies of DFIG based Wind Power Systems

Wind energy as an outstanding and competitive form of renewable energy, has been growing fast worldwide in recent years because of its importance to reduce the pollutant emission generated by conventional thermal power plants and the rising prices and the unstable supplies of fossil-fuel. However, in the development of wind energy, there are still many ongoing challenges. An important challenge is the need of voltage control to maintain the terminal voltage of a wind plant to make it a PV bus like conventional generators with excitation control. In the literature with PI controllers used, the parameters of PI controllers need to be tuned as a tradeoff or compromise among various operating conditions. In this work, a new voltage control approach is presented. In the proposed approach, the PI control gains are dynamically adjusted based on the dynamic, continuous sensitivity which essentially indicates the dynamic relationship between the change of control gains and the desired output voltage. Hence, this control approach does not require any good estimation or tuning of fixed control gains because it has the self-learning mechanism via the dynamic sensitivity. This also gives the plug-and-play feature of DFIG controllers to make it promising in utility practices. Another key challenge in power regulation of wind energy is the control design in wind energy conversion system (WECS) to realize the tradeoff between the energy cost and control performance subject to stochastic wind speeds. In this work, the chance constraints are considered to address the control inputs and system outputs, as opposed to deterministic constraints in the literature, where the chance constraints include the stochastic behavior of the wind speed fluctuation. Two different control problems are considered here: The first one assumes the wind speed disturbance’s distribution is Gaussian; the second one assumes the disturbance is norm bounded, and the problem is formulated as a min-max optimization problem which has not been considered in the literature. Both problems are formulated as semi-definite program (SDP) optimization problems that can be solved efficiently with existing software tools. And simulation results are provided to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method