High-order sliding mode control of a Marine Current Turbine driven Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator

This paper deals with the speed control of a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG)-based marine current turbine (MCT). Indeed, to increase the generated power and therefore the efficiency of an MCT, a nonlinear controller has been proposed. PMSG has been already considered for similar applications particularly wind turbine systems using mainly PI controllers. However, such kinds of controllers do not adequately handle some of tidal resource characteristics such as turbulence and swell effects. Indeed, these may decrease the MCT performances. Moreover, PMSG parameter variations should be accounted for. Therefore, a robust nonlinear control strategy, namely high-order sliding mode control, is proposed. The proposed control strategy is inserted in a global simulation tool that accounts for the resource and the marine turbine models. Simulations using tidal current data from the Raz de Sein (Brittany, France), and experiments on a 7.5-kW real-time simulator are carried out for validation purposes.