Evaluation of current harmonic distortion in wind farm application based on Synchronous Active Front End converters

Worldwide, request of renewable energy and power rating of wind farm is strongly increasing in parallel. This, makes more difficult the design of the power electronics converter that interfaces the grid to the renewable energy resource. Synchronous Active Front-End (SAFE) is considered one of the most efficient topology that successfully manages the hard trade-off between high power size and power quality requirements at the Point of Common Coupling (PCC). In this paper the authors present a mathematical approach to estimate the harmonic distortion of converter current at the PCC due to SPWM modulation. This, shows the advantages in terms of current spectrum of the SAFE topology. Moreover, it represents a strong tool in the converter design, as it allows to design converters parameters in order to respect power quality standards requirements. Finally, numerical simulation results validate the study.