Hardware-in-the-Loop Wind Turbine Simulation Platform for a Laboratory Feeder Model

As part of a larger project to build a laboratory-based smart grid feeder, there was a need to incorporate renewable energy sources into the feeder model. The goal in this project was to create a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) wind turbine simulation platform. Software is used to calculate a dynamic optimal power point from time-series wind speed data and to generate control signals for the platform's hardware. The hardware consists of a dc motor providing mechanical power to a coupled generator. To validate the HIL simulation platform, time-series wind speed and output power data were used from an installed and operating utility-scale turbine. The steady-state performance of the HIL simulator correlates well with the provided manufacturer's curve, but the dynamic performance of the system is more varied with periods of excellent correlation as well as poor. A richer data set from the utility containing more than wind speed and power output (such as wind direction and turbine yaw position) could provide substantial improvements to the dynamic performance.