Design and development of a hardware based wind turbine simulator

The design and development of a hardware based wind turbine simulator is outlined. The test rig consists of a 1kW synchronous generator coupled to the grid by a 2-level back to back inverter bridge controlled via a rapid prototyping embedded control system and driven by a DC-motor. Overall design objectives, required functionality and its application to the research area of large scale wind energy integration are described. Implementation of a control scheme for a synchronous machine based Wind Turbine is shown along with experimental results. One of the proposed applications of the simulator, investigation of fast frequency response from Full Power Converter (FPC) based turbines is given as an example.