Analysis and Mitigation of the Communication Delay Impacts on Wind Farm Central SSI Damping Controller

The use of supplementary controllers for mitigating subsynchronous interaction (SSI) in series compensated DFIG-based wind farms is quite promising due to high effectiveness and low cost. Implementation of such a controller requires effective communications between individual turbines and the wind farm controller, where the control performance is very much affected by the communication delays involved. This paper delivers the first detailed analysis on the impact of communication delays on SSI damping controller performance. A novel algorithm is proposed to calculate the stability delay margin (SDM) of the closed-loop system based on Rekasius Substitution and Guardian Map Theorem with the advantage of reduced computational burden particularly for high-order systems. Based on the proposed algorithm, the impacts of wind farm operating conditions and turbine control parameters on the SDM are investigated. To strengthen the SSI damping controller performance against communication delays, a Smith predictor scheme is also developed. The effectiveness of the proposed delay analysis framework and Smith predictor scheme based delay immune controller is validated through Electromagnetic Transient (EMT) simulations on a realistic test system with multiple series capacitor compensated lines considering various operation conditions.