Wind Speed and Rotor Position Sensorless Control for Direct-Drive PMG Wind Turbines

Wind turbine generators (WTGs) are usually equipped with mechanical sensors to measure wind speed and rotor position for system control, monitoring, and protection. The use of mechanical sensors increases the cost and hardware complexity and reduces the reliability of the WTG system. This paper proposes a wind speed and rotor position sensorless control for wind turbines directly driving permanent magnetic generators (PMGs). A sliding mode observer is designed to estimate the rotor position of the PMG, which is then used to calculate the shaft rotating speed. Based on the measured output electrical power and estimated rotor speed of the PMG, the mechanical power of the turbine is estimated by taking account into the power losses of the WTG system. A back propagation artificial neural network (BPANN) is then designed to estimate the wind speed in real time by using the estimated turbine shaft speed and mechanical power. The estimated wind speed is used to determine the optimal shaft speed or power reference for the PMG control system. Finally, a sensorless control is developed for the PMG wind turbines to continuously generate the maximum electrical power without using any wind speed or rotor position sensors. The validity of the proposed estimation and control algorithms are shown by simulation studies on a 3-kW PMG wind turbine and are further demonstrated by experimental results on a 300-W practical PMG wind turbine.