Maximum power extraction from a small wind turbine using 4-phase interleaved boost converter

This paper describes a 4-phase interleaved boost converter in a small wind turbine application. The boost converter is placed between the wind turbine and the load and is controlled to extract the maximum power from wind turbine. The boost converter duty ratio adjusted, based on the wind speed and rotor speed values, so that the wind turbine would be operated at the optimum tip speed ratio (TSR). A field programmable gate array (FPGA) based digital control system is adopted for converter control, with discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) control strategy, so that it is not necessary to actively balance the current on each phase. The modeling of the wind turbine system as well as power converter is studied by simulating analysis in Matlab/Simulink, and the corresponding hardware is designed for validation. Both results show that the proposed system design has high energy conversion efficiency, with simple but reliable control strategy.