2011

2012
Second
International
International
Conference
Conference
on Intelligent
on Intelligent
Systems
System
Design
Design
andand
Engineering
Engineering
Application
Application

A Dynamic Wind Turbine Simulator of the wind turbine generator system

Lei Lu1,Zhen Xie1, Xing Zhang1, Shuying Yang1, Renxian Cao2

1. School of Electric Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology, HeFei, China
2. Hefei Sungrow Power Supply Co, Ltd, Hefei, China
E-mail:anddy3117045@163.com; ppsd2003xie@sina.com; honglf@ustc.edu.cn

Abstract—To study dynamic performances of wind turbine
generator system (WTGS), and to determine the control
structures in laboratory. The dynamic torque generated by
wind turbine (WT) must be simulated. In there paper , a
dynamic wind turbine emulator (WTE) is designed, which
consider wind shear and tower shadow effect, and a dynamic
torque compensation scheme is also developed to compensate
the different inertia between a lab scale motor and a actual
rotor blade and shaft. The dynamic torque is taken as
reference to control an inductance motor which is driven by an
inverter to simulate the wind turbine. The simulation results
show this simulation system is feasible and efficient. The wind
turbine simulator close to actual ones and can be used as a
substitute for actual wind turbine in experiment.
Keywords—dynamic wind turbine emulation; wind shear;
tower shadow; torque compensation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wind energy is one of the important ways to deal with
the growing energy demands and environmental crisis. In
order to research wind power generation system, it is
necessary to build a wind turbine emulator (WTE) to
simulate the steady-state and dynamic behavior of the system
in a laboratory environment, and use the WTE to test the
power electronics and control algorithms. A lot of wind
turbine emulators have been present in the literature [1-6]. In
general, the WTE can be divided into two parts: torque servo
system and reference wind turbine output torque calculation
module. But the existing simulation programs have the
following shortcomings.
1)Studies that consider only steady-state power(torque)
curves to calculate the output power(or torque) but
neglecting aerodynamic effects such as wind shear, tower
shadow, and yaw error [2][3].
2)Studies that consider only the aerodynamic effects, but
neglect the mechanical effects such as the Shaft
Characteristics, different rotational inertia between the actual
rotor blade and simulation motor[4][5].
3)Studies that consider aerodynamic and mechanical
effects, but they are either not precise enough or difficult to
achieve[6].
These neglected factors cause the fluctuations and
harmonic pollution in the power grid, which play important
roles in the control algorithm of grid-converters in the
WTGS. Without these factors, the WTE system can not
accurately simulate the actual system, and not suitable for the
study of WTGS. In this paper, a comprehensive WT
simulation method which considers most of important
aerodynamics effects and torque compensation is developed,
and a dynamic WTE system was built to simulate the WTGS.
This paper is organized as follows. The section Ċ
discusses on aerodynamic torque applied to the wind turbine,
and torque compensation algorithm for the emulation of the
large moment of inertia of actual blades. Simulation results
about the dynamic torque output and effects of torque
compensation are presented in section ċ. The sectionČ
describes the WTE system and sectiončconcludes the paper
with analysis of the results and discusses the validity of the
emulator.
II. DYNAMIC TORQUE CALCULAION
A. Steady-State Wind Turbine Model
According to the aerodynamic characteristics of wind
turbine, the steady-state output mechanical power[7] given by:
1
P Cp (O , E )S R 2 UV 3 (1)
2
P 1 Cp (O , E )S R 2 UV 3
T (2)
Z 2 Z
Where, Z is rotational angular speed of blade ( rad / sec ),
Cp (O , E ) is wind energy utilization coefficient, U is the air
density ( kg / m3 ), R is the turbine radius ( m ), V is the wind
velocity ( m / s ). The wind energy utilization coefficient
Cp (O , E ) is a function of tip speed ratio O and pitch angle
E , where O is defined as O Z R / V .
According to the numerical approximation method,
Cp (O , E ) as follows:
§ 116 ·
CP (O , E ) 0.5176 ¨  0.4E  5 ¸ e 21/ Oi  0.0068O (3)
© Oi ¹
1 1 0.035
 3 (4)
Oi O  0.08E E  1
When wind speed is constant, the output power would be
different at different rotate speed, but there is always a
optimum angular velocity which make the maximum power
capture. This is called maximum power point tracking as we
can see in Fig.1. This theory would be used to verify the
wind turbine emulator according to this paper.

978-0-7695-4608-7/12 $26.00 © 2012

978-0-7695-4608-7/11 2011 IEEE 967
DOI 10.1109/ISdea.2012.549
10.1109/ISdea.2011.172
 1.4
360q(0q) Wind Velocity
Vwind=13m/s
1.2

Vwind=12m/s
1
Hub
0.8
Vwind=11m/s
270q
T 90q VH
Nacelle
Vwind=10m/s
r
0.6 Vwind=9m/s
T

y
0.4
Vwind=8m/s x
Vwind=7m/s
Vwind=6m/s
0.2 Vwind=5m/s
Tower
180q
Tower
H
0 Shadow Area 2a 2a
-0.2
0 5 10 15 20 25
n
Fig.2 Wind Shear and Tower Shadow diagram of Wind Turbine
Fig.1 Torque-speed curves of a wind turbine Where V0 is the spatial mean wind speed; a is the radius of
B. Wind Shear Effect the tower and x and y are the components of the distance
As a turbine rotates, the output characteristic fluctuate by between blade and the tower midline in the lateral and the
wind speed change with height is termed vertical wind shear longitudinal directions.
effects. It can be seen from Fig.1. Wind shear effects not D. Torque Compensation
only cause torque pulsations but also affect the output power
quality. A common wind shear model, show as (5), is taken If a WTE wants to simulation the actual wind turbine
from the literature [8] [9]. accurately, the different rotational inertia between the actual
rotor blade and simulation motor must be considered in the
r cos T  H D
V (r , T ) VH ( ) VH [1  Ws (r , T )] (5) output torque model. This paper gives a simply torque
H compensation method [12] to solve the issue. Wind turbine
r D (D  1) r 2 kinetic equation can be expressed as (11):
Ws (r , T ) D ( ) cos T  ( ) cos 2 T 
H 2 H dZ
D (D  1)(D  2) r 3 3 Tblade ( J B  J G ) b  TG (9)
( ) cos T (6) dt
6 H And the simulation motor output equation:
Where VH is the wind speed at hub height, r is the radial dZg
TM ( J M  J G )  TG (10)
distance from rotor axis, D is the empirical wind shear dt
exponent, H is the elevation of rotor hub and T is To get the same TG , with (11) and (12), we obtain:
azimuthal angle of blades as show in Fig.1. dZg
C. Tower Shadow Effect TM Tblade  ( J B  J M ) (11)
dt
When the wind passes through the tower, the wind The compensation torque:
distribution is changed because of the resistance of tower dZg
structure. When any of the blades in front of the tower, the Tcomp Tblade  TM (JB  JM ) (12)
torque output is reduced, this effects is termed tower shadow dt
as show in Fig.1. Which results the 3p oscillations in the Where J B , J G and J M are the inertia of the turbine blades
output of power (or torque) of a three-bladed wind turbine. (in high speed shaft), generator and simulation motor
Most of the modern wind turbines choose upwind rotors respectively; Tblade , TM and TG represent the torque of
because tower shadow effect of the upwind turbines is less blades, motor and generator ; Tcomp is the compensation
than the downwind turbines. Using potential flow theory for
wind movement around the tower, literature [8] [9] modeled torque.
tower disturbance (7). III. SIMULATION RESULTS
y2  x2
V ( y, x) VH  vtower ( y, x) VH  V0 a 2 In the section Ċthe major factors of dynamic torque
( x 2  y 2 )2 output has been discussed. So the dynamic aerodynamic
r 2 sin 2 (T )  x 2 torque of three-bladed turbines is given as [11]. The Fig.3 is
VH  mVH a 2 (7) the schematic diagram of the simulation model.
(r 2 sin 2 (T )  x 2 ) 2
ª D (D  1) R 2 º
V0 VH «1  » mVH (8)
¬ 8H 2 ¼

968
Vwind Wind Turbine Tblade + TM Zg Fig.6 is the stator current of DFIG, it shows the effects of
WS and TS cause clearly power quality problem.
E Dynamic K gear DFIG Fig.7 gives comparison of the output motor speed with
Zwt Model  torque compensation (curve B) and without compensation
Tcomp (curve A). In the motor start-up phase (0~5s), curve A is
1
increased slower compare to the B. At 15s the wind speed is
K gear forced to zero and curve A decreased to zero rapidly and
dZg
Tcomp ( J B  J M ) steeply compare to motor speed with torque compensation
dt (curve B) decreased slowly and smoothly. When 45s the
wind speed back to normal, the comparison between curve
A and B also proved the feasibility and validity of the torque
Fig.3 The simulation model diagram
compensation algorithm.
1.02

wind shear
300
1.01
tower shadow
250
1
TS+WS A.Motor speed with compensation

motor speed(ran/sec)
Totque of the Wind Turbine(pu)

0.99
200

0.98 150

0.97 100
0.96
B.Motor speed without compensation
50
0.95
0
0.94
-50
0.93 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
time(s) time(s)
Fig.4 The effect of the WS and TS in three-bladed turbine Fig.7 Motor speed with torque compensation and without compensation
-0.9

-0.95 stator positive power IV. THE EMULATE SYSTEM AND EXPERIMENT RESULTS
Torque of the DFIG
-1
According to theories from the section Ċ and the
-1.05
simulation results of the third ċ. A wind turbine emulator
Output of DFIG(pu)

-1.1
system was built as shown in Fig.8. The dynamic torque
-1.15
calculated by the DSP and the simulation motor controlled
-1.2
by a vector inverter, the DIFG connected to grid through a
-1.25 back-to-back converter.
-1.3

-1.35

Wind shear
14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30
Vector D/A Dynamic Torque
time(s)
interface Calculation Pitch Angle
Fig.5 Stator positive power and torque of DFIG with TS and WS Inverter
circuit TMS320F28335 Yaw Angle
2

1.5
15kw 11kw
Asynchrono
1
us Motor Zg DFIG
stator current of DFIG(pu)

0.5
Grid
0
Back-to-
DSP Controller
-0.5 Back
TMS320F2407
Convert
-1
Fig.8. Schematic diagram of the WTE system
-1.5
The experiment results as Fig.9-11. In fig.9 the torque
-2
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 current of DFIG with TS and WS has clearly periodicity
time(s)
pulsation, and the frequency of rotational if the wind turbine
Fig.6 Stator current of DFIG with WS and TS
speed multiplied by the number of blades.Fig.10 show the
Fig.4 shows the effects of wind shear (WS) and tower
stator current of DFIG with the effects of TS and WS, it
shadow (TS). The pulsation of output torque from tower
reproduced the characteristic of actual wind turbine, that
shadow effect is far great than the wind shear effect. Fig.5
could cause the harmonic pollution and power fluctuation
shows the stator positive power and torque of DFIG at the
and cause the power quality problems. Fig.11 show the
effect of TS and WS, it’s obvious have periodicity pulsation.
contrast between with and without TS&WS effects, the

969
difference is clearly in the torque current and stator current .
Fig.9. Torque current and rotor current of the DFIG with TS and WS
Fig.10. Torque current and stator current of the DFIG with TS and WS
Fig.11. The output character the DFIG with and without TS&WS
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel simulation model that considers
the tower shadow, wind shear, yaw error and torque
compensation effects was developed and a actual simulator
was built. This platform can be used to test wind turbine
behavior and to develop the control strategies of the WTGS.
The simulation results verified the feasibility and accuracy
of this program.
To improve system performance, further system test
such as maximum power point tracking, pitch control is
being undertaken and in next studies, more factors that
970
affect the output power (or torque) would be considered to
make the simulator closer to the real system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper is supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China: Lab Simulation and Control of the
Grid Faults Adaptability for Wind Power Converter
(51077034).
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