Efficiency and reliability improvement in wind turbine converters by grid converter adaptive control

This paper presents a control method that reduces the losses in wind turbine converters adaptively controlling the grid converter. The dc-link voltage adapts its reference based on the system state and therefore reduces the stored energy, and is therefore kept at the minimum necessary for the grid and generator side. Operating in this way, the electrical and thermal stress factors are decreased on the power electronic devices, increasing their lifetime. The simulation results using this method show efficiency increase and devices temperature cycles slightly decreased. Experimental results on a wind turbine power stack shows efficiency increase in the high power region.