A Comprehensive Large-Wind-Turbine Emulator for Accurate Wind-Energy Harvest Evaluation

Robust modeling and emulation are required to support the design of ultra-wind turbines and analyze the effects of various factors, parameters, and environmental disturbances. The models that are constructed based on pure computational methods, in which the entire emulator is created in computational software are cost-effective, and their speed depends on the employed computation platform. However, these methods' practical significance and accuracy are considerably lower than that of the combined physical and computational platform methods. Therefore, A comprehensive 5 MW wind turbine emulator’s design and implementation are investigated thoroughly in this paper. A separately excited DC motor set under the control of a current-controlled drive forms the basis of the suggested emulation. The emulation algorithms that simulate the features of the 5 MW wind turbine are executed on a digital signal processor. These algorithms regulate the DC motor's current, which in turn regulates the torque. The results obtained demonstrate that the system was successful in accurately simulating the transient and steady-state characteristics of the 5 MW wind turbine. The emulator system was initially tested and validated with simulation results using MATLAB/Simulink code attached to both the FAST and TurbSim models. Furthermore, step and stochastic wind profiles were used to experimentally verify and test it. Nearly all of the power that is available in the wind turbine system is successfully acquired using the maximum power point tracking technique, which is used to find the optimum operating point. The developed wind turbine emulator can be used to precisely assess energy harvesting by examining various mechanical and electrical input/output values of the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator vastly used in ultra-large wind turbine nacelles.