Analysis of design variations in brushless double-fed reluctance generators for wind turbine applications

This paper studies different rotor topologies for the design of a 2 MW doubly-fed reluctance generator for a wind turbine application. There have been several papers that put forward different options for this type of machine and the control has been extensively studied. This paper uses the same stator size and application to enable comparative operation. This machine has two 3-phase winding sets - a 4 pole and an 8-pole arrangement, and a 6-pole reluctance type of rotor. Different designs for the rotor are investigated in terms of either their duct arrangement or solid salient pole structure. The key issue for this machine is the coupling between the stator winding sets.