Robust design of a passive wind turbine system

Purpose – The effectiveness of full passive wind turbine (WT) systems has been recently demonstrated. Such low cost and reliable structures without active control and with a minimum number of sensors can be efficient only if the system design parameters are mutually adapted through an integrated optimal design approach. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of a passive WT with regard to the variations of PMSG electrical parameters.Design/methodology/approach – This work is more specifically devoted to the sensitivity analysis of a passive WT system according to the electrical variable variations of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG). It also investigates the interest of a robust design approach for reducing the sensitivity of the WT efficiency to the most influencing variables.Findings – It is shown that efficiency of the passive WT system is rather sensitive to the variation of the stator flux and DC voltage at the system output.Originality/value – A robust design approa...