Design and Simulation of a Controller for Emulation of a Wind Turbine by a DC Motor

The demand for technical solutions to incorporate wind generation in microgrids has been motivating the development of systems for emulation of wind turbines, since laboratory experiments with real turbines are not feasible. In this context, some studies evaluate the performance of electronic converters, while others address the impact of the wind generator on the microgrid dynamic response. However, most of these studies neglect the actual features of the wind regime in the region of the wind turbine installation, adopting simplifications that are distant from the reality. For this reason, the design and simulation of a controller to emulate wind turbine-generator setup using a direct current (DC) motor and a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) is proposed in this paper. The main contribution of this work is the consideration of the wind speed variations using realistic time series. The mechanical and electrical models were implemented in Matlab/Simulink and the wind series were generated by the TurbSim software. The control system of the DC motor consists of PI controllers. The results show that the error between wind turbine reference speed and the motor rotor DC speed is negligible, which validates the proposed tuning of the PI parameters.