Electrodynamic braking of wind turbines

Electrodynamic braking offers several advantages over conventional wind-turbine brakes, such as controllable braking torque and high reliability, while requiring minimal maintenance. The technique has not been widely implemented in modern wind turbines, owing to a lack of appropriate design tools and liinited operating experience. A transient induction machine model has been developed and validated at laboratory scale and then used to design an electrodynamic brake for a 45 1tW fixed-speed wind turbine. Field trials were conducted successfully at a UK wind-test site. The potential for exploiting the technique at large scale, both 600kW and 1 MW, has been investigated.