Design and Control of a Small Scale Wind Turbine Emulator with a DC Motor

Due to the high cost of wind turbines and the need for research and development of wind turbines on a small scale, this paper presents the design and the control steps of a wind turbine emulator by using a separately excited DC motor. Emulation methodology of the wind turbine is achieved by running the DC motor to generate speed and torque required by the generator for producing electrical power. The control of the DC motor is elaborated using Matlab/Simulink platform. The control of pitch angle of the wind turbine was used to reduce the torque and the variation of the output power in high wind speed zones, the speed of the wind turbine must be kept in check to avoid damage. In this paper, a pitch angle based speed control mechanism is presented by using two different types of control systems PID and Fuzzy Logic. Finally Results confirm that the WTE can perform satisfactorily under stochastic wind speed profile.