Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Hardware in the Loop Wind Turbine
Simulator for Control System Testing
Yolanda Vidal, Leonardo Acho, Ningsu Luo and Christian Tutiven
Abstract This chapter illustrates how to set up an inexpensive but effective
Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) platform for the test of wind turbine (WT) control-
lers. The dynamics of the WT are simulated on the open-source National
Renewable Energy Laboratory WT simulator called FAST (Fatigue, Aerody-
namics, Structures, and Turbulence), which emulates all required input signals of
the controller and reacts to the controller commands (almost) like an onshore real
turbine of 5 MW. The dynamic torque control system runs on an open hardware
Arduino microcontroller board, which is connected to the virtual WT via USB. In
particular, the power generation control in the full load region for variable-speed
variable-pitch wind turbines is considered through torque and pitch control. The
HIL proposed platform is used to characterize the behavior of the WT in normal
operation as well as in fault operation. In particular, a stuck/unstuck fault is
modeled and the behavior of a proposed chattering torque controller is analyzed in
comparison to a baseline torque controller.
Keywords Hardware-in-the-loop
FAST
Arduino
Control
Fault
Nomenclature
b
k
Pitch control, k
ΒΌ
1
;
2
;
3
