LVRT Control of Back-to-Back Power Converter PMSG Wind Turbine Systems: an FPGA Based Hardware-in-the-Loop Solution

Wind power penetration of the modern grid is seeing an aggressive increase in recent years. This leads to the concerns of the general stability of the grid. To ensure the stability of both the grid and the wind power generation systems, grid code requirements must be respected properly. To fulfill part of these requirements, wind turbines shall be capable of riding through short term grid dip faults without disconnection to support the grid recovery, i.e., Low Voltage Ride Through (LVRT) capability. This work summarizes the available LVRT solutions and presents a LVRT control method combined within the direct model predictive control frame dealing with back-to-back power converter PMSG wind turbine systems. Both the energy buffering capability via the turbine inertia and energy dissipation via an active craw-bar circuit are fully explored. Moreover, an efficient fully FPGA based Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) solution is employed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution in real-time, which makes the controller verification with great flexibility and at low cost.