An emulator for fixed pitch wind turbine studies

A wind turbine emulator is an important hardware to simulate wind energy conversion systems. The emulator hardware is often built by a coupled motor as prime mover and controlled by a variable speed drive to the shaft of an electrical generator. In this work, we propose, design and implement a novel wind turbine emulator by using a squirrel cage induction machine and permanent magnet induction generator. The control of the prime mover is performed by an IGBT AC drive. The drive itself is controlled by a 32-bit microprocessor. Furthermore, the computer supervises the drive and generates the wind patterns and sets the configuration of wind turbine models. This allows the user to define different wind patterns and to emulate different wind turbines. The combination of the PI controller, the computer supervision, and the microprocessor ensures an accurate performance of entire system. The frequency of the generated voltage is proportional to the shaft rotational speed. Therefore, the output voltage frequency is used as a rotational speed meter. RS-485 is the main communication channel between the drive and the computer. Finally, the results demonstrate the effective and accurate performance of the proposed emulator in reproducing the dynamics of an actual wind turbine.