Design and application of a Linux Real Time board for distributed power generation

The use of distributed energy resources is increasing and represents a valid answer to environmental problems and to the significant costs of more traditional energy sources. The need of developing distributed energy systems is strictly related to the need of flexible and scalable high level controller, able to manage control references in order to optimise global system efficiency. This paper proposes a solution based on Real Time Linux environment, which can be applied both to single source system and to multi-source ones. A soft PLC emulator together with other software tools are provided to help application development process. The proposed control board has been developed for wind turbine applications and has been preliminary tested.