Wind Turbine Emulator for experimental microgrids

This paper presents the “hardware in the loop” wind turbine emulator installed at the PrInCE Lab microgrid of the Polytechnic University of Bari. The emulator consists of a four-quadrant 60-kVA AC/AC converter that behaves as a controlled current source for the microgrid. The control of the power converter is performed by a local microcontroller, which enables the emulation of different kinds of horizontal as well as vertical axis wind turbines. The emulator includes also an HMI software that allows the user to directly interact with the emulator, providing him the ability to choose the wind turbine model and wind speed to adopt for testing purposes.