Hill Climbing MPPT Control of Large Wind Turbines

This paper proposes a new Hill Climbing (HC) Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) control for large wind turbines, where the wind rotor inertia is not possible to neglect in the MPPT control. In addition to the proposed MPPT control, an analytic design methodology for speed and current loops for the control of back to back converter is provided. Experimental study has been conducted based on a wind turbine emulator with an Induction Motor (IM) and Permanent Synchronous Generator (PMSM) mechanically coupled to the IM. Experimental results show that the proposed MPPT control captures more power from the wind than the conventional one by 8.22%, for the same wind profile.