Improved STATCOM operation under transient disturbances for wind power applications

This paper presents an optimized STATCOM control for wind power applications. The transient behavior of fixed-speed wind farms can be improved by injecting large amounts of reactive power during the fault recovery. This application requires a high dynamic converter, which must also be capable of working under transient unbalanced conditions. Here, a stationary control structure is proposed, which is based on resonant regulators and a DFT synchronization algorithm, which allows an optimized reactive power injection during voltage dips occurred in the grid. The proposed structure is validated experimentally using a reduced scale STATCOM prototype, showing that it is well adapted for the concerned application.