Hardware-in-the-Loop Wind Turbine Simulation Platform for a Laboratory Feeder Model

As part of a larger project to build a laboratory-based smart grid feeder, there was a need to incorporate renewable energy sources into the feeder model. The goal in this project was to create a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) wind turbine simulation platform. Software is used to calculate a dynamic optimal power point from time-series wind speed data and to generate control signals for the platform´s hardware. The hardware consists of a dc motor providing mechanical power to a coupled generator. To validate the HIL simulation platform, time-series wind speed and output power data were used from an installed and operating utility-scale turbine. The steady-state performance of the HIL simulator correlates well with the provided manufacturer´s curve, but the dynamic performance of the system is more varied with periods of excellent correlation as well as poor. A richer data set from the utility containing more than wind speed and power output (such as wind direction and turbine yaw position) could provide substantial improvements to the dynamic performance.