Fault-tolerant control of a PMSG-based wind turbine based on parallel interleaved converters

Authors: MOHAMED ABBES

Abstract: Lowering the cost of wind energy has been one of the main objectives of the wind industry in the past years. To achieve this objective, considerable research efforts have been made to improve the availability of wind turbines. Recent statistical analyses have shown that frequency converters are among the most frequently failing components for variable speed wind systems. Therefore, several configurations were proposed in the literature to improve the availability of these generating devices. These configurations are mainly based on the redundancy of power converters (active and standby) or the converter bypass technique. However, for the special case of PMSG-based wind turbines, the power electronic subsystem cannot be bypassed and redundancy will significantly increase the cost of the overall structure since fully rated converters are used. Therefore, this paper proposes a new design for PMSG-based wind turbines based on parallel interleaved converters and a fault-tolerant control strategy. In the proposed configuration, the generator-side and the grid-side converters are made with two parallel interleaved converters with separate DC links. The design is intended to offer continuity of service in the event of converter failure with low additional costs. The design, simulation, and advantages of the proposed configuration are detailed throughout the paper.

Keywords: Wind turbines, permanent magnet synchronous generator, parallel interleaved converter, fault-tolerant control

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