Condition monitoring of a wind turbine generator using a standalone wind turbine emulator

The intend of this paper is to give a description of the realization of a low-cost wind turbine emulator (WTE) with open source technology from graze required for the condition monitoring to diagnose rotor and stator faults in a wind turbine generator (WTG). The WTE comprises of a 2.5 kW DC motor coupled with a 1 kW squirrel-cage induction machine. This paper provides a detailed overview of the hardware and software used along with the WTE control strategies such as MPPT and pitch control. The emulator reproduces dynamic characteristics both under step variations and arbitrary variation in the wind speed of a typical wind turbine (WT) of a wind energy conversion system (WECS). The usefulness of the setup has been benchmarked with previously verified WT test rigs made at the University of Manchester and Durham University in UK. Considering the fact that the rotor blades and electric subassemblies direct drive WTs are most susceptible to damage in practice, generator winding faults and rotor unbalance have been introduced and investigated using the terminal voltage and generated current. This wind turbine emulator (WTE) can be reconfigured or analyzed for condition monitoring without the need for real WTs.