ECE 590I POWER & ENERGY SYSTEMS SEMINAR
WHEN: Monday, November 28, 2022
WHERE: 4070 ECEB, 3:00 – 3:50 p.m.; Zoom Meeting ID: 881 4997 1008; Password: seminar
SPEAKER: Debranjan Mukherjee, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
TITLE: "A DC-Grid Interface for Wind Energy Systems"
ABSTRACT: We consider an integrated generator–rectifier architecture to harvest energy from offshore wind resources. A highly attractive feature of this architecture is that much of the energy is processed by reliable, efficient and cost-effective diodes that operate at the generator frequency. An emerging trend in offshore wind farms is the deployment of DC collection grids at either medium- or highlevel voltages. We discuss a proposed DC grid interface circuit for the integrated generator– rectifier and its use to provide maximum power point tracking. We illustrate the proposed architecture and its performance with a 10-MW design. Our results, obtained on a laboratory prototype, indicate that the proposed architecture reduces the total switch volt–ampere rating requirements by 22.8 %, which implies an overall loss reduction that ranges from 28.3 to 71.7 % and is a function of the power injection. The implementation of the maximum power point tracking algorithm explicitly uses the relationship between the active rectifier d-axis current and the generated energy. These results validate the effectiveness of both the proposed converter architecture and the maximum power point tracking control strategy. The encouraging results to date indicate the potential of the proposed architecture and control mechanism in their application to the integration of DC collection networks in offshore wind farms.
