Power Quality Enhancement for a Grid Connected Wind Turbine Energy System

A comprehensive control of a wind turbine system connected to an industrial plant is discussed in this paper, where an algorithm has been developed allowing a control structure that utilizes a four-leg inverter connected to the grid side to inject the available energy, as well as to work as an active power filter mitigating load current disturbances and enhancing power quality. A four-wire system is considered with three-phase and single-phase linear and nonlinear loads. During the connection of the wind turbine, the utility-side controller is designed to compensate the disturbances caused in presence of reactive, nonlinear, and/or unbalanced single- and intra-phase loads, in addition to providing active and reactive power as required. When there is no wind power available, the controller is intended to improve the power quality using the dc-link capacitor with the power converter attached to the grid. The main difference of the proposed methodology with respect to others in the literature is that the proposed control structure is based on the conservative power theory decompositions. This choice provides decoupled power and current references for the inverter control, offering very flexible, selective, and powerful functionalities. Real-time software benchmarking has been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed control algorithm for full real-time implementation. The control methodology is implemented and validated in hardware-in-the-loop based on the real time simulator “Opal-RT” and a TMSF28335 DSP microcontroller. The results corroborated our power quality enhancement control and allowed to exclude passive filters, contributing to a more compact, flexible, and reliable electronic implementation of a smart-grid based control.