A highly reliable converter for wind power generation application

This paper proposes a novel soft switching ac link converter for wind power generation. In this converter, the link is formed by a low reactive rating series inductor/capacitor (LC) pair having alternating current and voltage. Therefore, the proposed converter does not include any dc capacitors or chokes, resulting in a very compact design and reliable performance. The proposed converter is a partial resonant converter i.e. only a small time interval is allocated to resonance in each cycle. Hence, while the resonance facilitates zero current turn-off of the switches, the LC link has low reactive ratings and low power dissipation. Due to the zero current turn off of the switches, the switching frequency can be as high as permitted by the switches. The high frequency of the link minimizes the size of the passive components. Switches used in this converter can be of any type; even SCRs can be used. In order to provide galvanic isolation a single phase high frequency transformer can be added to the link. Light weight and compactness, along with high efficiency and long lifetime, make the proposed converter, which is named Series Partial Resonant Converter (SEPARC), an excellent candidate for different applications, especially wind power generation systems. In this paper, the performance of the proposed converter is evaluated for wind power generation applications.