Development of a wind turbine simulator

Abstract

As a renewable energy source, wind power has become a hot research topic, despite the lack of wind-environment simulation equipment in most laboratories. To address this shortcoming, this paper developed equipment based on a DC motor to simulate wind turbines. The reference torque is determined by the operational parameters of the wind turbine. The DC-motor speed is regulated by using DC pulse-width modulation, so that the output characteristics of the DC motor may be tuned to be equivalent to those of the wind turbine. A dsPIC30F2010-microcontroller-based hardware platform is used in experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Keywords

• wind turbines
• dc motors
• machine control
• microcontrollers
• wind power plants
• dspic30f2010-microcontroller-based hardware platform
• dc pulse-width modulation
• dc-motor speed
• simulate wind turbines
• dc motor
• wind-environment simulation equipment
• renewable energy source
• wind turbine simulator