DYNAMICAL BEHAVIOR OF A WIND TURBINE POWER TRAIN CONSIDERING A ROTOR-GEARBOX-GENERATOR COUPLED MODEL

Abstract. The world’s energy demand is growing with increasing population and development in emerging markets. Electricity generation from fossil fuels, which represent the main source of energy in the world, is responsible for a significant amount of land, water and air pollution due to CO2 production as well as other greenhouse gases emissions. In this context, the use of renewable energy sources has gained a lot of attention in the last decades, as solar, biomass and wind energies. Considering the high wind energy potential worldwide, wind turbine modeling and analysis has been studied by several authors recently. The goal is to have a better understanding of the system behavior in order to increase the efficiency in the energy conversion and reduce the cost. The electromechanical dynamics of power trainwhich is composed mainly by the rotor, gearbox and generator plays an important role on the turbine performance. In the literature, it is usual to focus on the modeling of one of these three elements and consider simplified dynamics to the others. In this paper, a complete model is considered, named rotor-gearbox-generator coupled model, where the three elements are focused on with the goal of obtaining a more realistic representation of wind turbines power train. The gear box considered in this work consists in a two-stage planetary with epicyclicgearing, while a permanent magnet synchronous generator is considered. The dynamical behavior is evaluated for different loads showing system behaviorand energy conversion efficiency.