Battery Buffered Stiff Micro Grid Structure For A Variable Speed Slip Ring Induction Machine Based Wind Generation System

Abstract

Electric power has become a basic necessity of human life. The major share of electric power comes from fossil fuel which results in global warming and pollution. A share of generated power comes from nuclear power which is equally dangerous. Big hydro projects take away lots of fertile land. The continuous usage of fossil fuel also poses a threat of petroleum and coal getting over in the near future. The only way out of this energy scarcity is to depend more and more on renewable sources like solar, wind and micro-hydro. At present, instead of having preference over any particular source of renewable energy, effort should be made to extract power from every possible energy source available in whatever form it is and use it in an optimal way. Like any renewable energy sources, the wind power contains large potential for harnessing energy that has been well understood hundreds of years ago. The importance of wind power generation has come to focus recently both at installation and research level and lot of activities are being carried out for efficient use of wind energy. There are different types of wind turbine designs available in the literature. But the most commercially used model is the two or three blade horizontal axis propeller type wind turbine. Research has shown that variable speed operation of this type of turbine is advantageous over fixed speed operation in terms of total energy synthesis. The most commonly used machines for wind power conversion are synchronous machine, squirrel cage induction machine and slip ring induction machine (SRIM). Variable speed operation using synchronous machine or squirrel cage induction machine requires large ratings of the power converters. However, SRIM based variable speed wind generator is advantageous over other schemes due to its inherent advantages like lower power rating for the converters, higher energy capture and the flexibility of sharing reactive power between the stator and the rotor. SRIM is used for both grid connected and stand alone applications and have been reported in the literature. The grid connected applications have received major attention in the literature whereas there are only a very few instances of its stand alone counterparts. There are many places both within and outside India where utility grid has not yet reached or the available grid is very weak. Moreover, in many of the places, the transmission line is so long that the losses in the system are extremely high. Isolated wind power generation can be of great advantage in such places where the available wind power is harnessed and utilized locally. This has been the motivation to go for proposing an isolated wind power generation scheme in this thesis. The proposed scheme is designed to supply power to the load even when very low or no wind power is available. Therefore, a battery bank is also a part of the system. The power converter assembly of the proposed scheme has three major components. One is the rotor side converter which is connected to the rotor terminals of the SRIM. The second one is the stator side converter with output LC filter which is connected to the stator side. These two converters share a common DC link which is interfaced to the battery bank through a multi phase bi-directional fly-back DC-DC converter. Fig. 1. Overall block diagram of the proposed stand alone wind power generator Functionally, this thesis proposes a system as shown in Fig. 1, which has primarily two components with multiple energy ports viz. (i) the SRIM is one triple energy port component and (ii) the proposed power conditioner is another triple energy port component. The SRIM device consists of (i) a mechanical energy port that is interfaced with the windmill shaft (ii) an AC port through the stator windings that is interfaced with the micro-grid/load and (iii) a third port which is also an AC port through the rotor windings of the SRIM that interfaces with an AC port of the proposed power conditioner. The proposed power conditioner is another triple energy port device which consists of (i) a DC energy port that interfaces with a battery/accumulator, (ii) an AC port that interfaces with the rotor windings of the SRIM and (iii) another AC port that generates the micro-grid that is connected to the load and the stator port of the SRIM. The proposed power conditioner provides the frame work for managing the energy flow from the mechanical port of the SRIM to the rotor and accumulator as well as from the mechanical port to the stator/load and accumulator. Further, energy interaction can also take place between the stator and the rotor externally through the power conditioner. The power interfaces on all three energy ports of the proposed power conditioner poses several challenges that have been discussed in this thesis. This thesis focuses on developing schemes to solve these challenges as explained below. Speed sensorless control is a natural choice for slip ring induction machine because of the flexibility of sensing both stator and rotor currents. There are different methods proposed in the literature which deal with the speed sensorless control of slip ring induction machine. However, the elimination of the measurement noise in the flux position estimation is not sufficiently addressed. It is important to address this issue as this would lead to deterioration in rotor side control of SRIM if the measurement noise is not eliminated. Primarily, the schemes which use algebraic relation between the estimated rotor current in stator reference frame and the sensed rotor current, are prone to measurement noise. On the other hand, the schemes, which use rotor back-emf integration, are affected by DC drift problems, though they are not much affected by measurement noise. The proposed stator flux position estimation scheme incorporates the benefits obtained from both the above schemes while eliminating the disadvantages inherent to them. The rotor flux position is estimated by integrating the rotor back-electromotive force. The stator flux is then obtained from the rotor flux estimate. This integration mechanism leads to several problems like dc drift and lack of error decaying mechanism. This estimation scheme solves the above problems including reduction in the propagation of noise in the sensed current to the estimated rotor side unit vectors. On the implementation front, this scheme also eliminates the need for differentiating the unit vectors for estimating slip frequency. This makes the proposed flux estimator very robust. The proposed scheme is simulated and experimentally verified. There is an internal DC bus within the proposed power conditioner that manages the energy flow through the three energy ports. The internal DC bus is interfaced to an external accumulator or battery through a power interface called the multi phase bi-directional dc-dc converter. It is generally advantageous to have the motor rated for higher voltages in order to achieve better efficiencies for a given power rating as compared to low voltage motors. This implies higher DC bus voltage. On the other hand, it is advantageous to have the battery bank rated for low voltage in order to improve the volumetric efficiency which is better at lower battery bank voltages. Both these are contradictory requirements. The above problem is solved in this thesis by proposing a multi power port topology using a bidirectional fly-back converter that is capable of handling multiple power sources and still maintain simplicity and features like high gain, wide load variations and lower output current ripple. As a spin-off, the scheme can handle parallel energy transfer from even a eutectic combination of batteries without any additional control circuitry for parallel operation. Further, the scheme also incorporates a novel transformer winding technique which significantly reduces the leakage inductance of the coupled inductor. The proposed multi-port bidirectional converter is analyzed by including non-idealities like leakage inductance. The DC bus voltage regulation requirement is not very stringent because it is not directly fed to any load. Therefore, hysteresis voltage regulation with small proportional correction is used for DC bus voltage control. The proposed converter is built and experimentally verified in the proposed system as well as in a hybrid-electric vehicle prototype. The third port of the proposed power conditioner interfaces with the stator of the SRIM and the load. The stator/load needs to be connected to a stiff micro-grid. The control requirement of the micro-grid is very stringent because, even for a sudden variation in the wind speed or the load, the grid voltage magnitude and frequency should not change. The dynamic response of the grid voltage controller has to be very fast. Moreover, the grid voltage must be balanced in presence of unbalanced loading. This thesis proposes a converter called the stator side converter along with three phase L-C filter at its output to form the micro-grid. A generalized control scheme is proposed wherein the negative sequence components and the harmonics can be eliminated at the micro-grid by means of feed-forward compensators included in the fundamental positive synchronous reference frame alone. The theoretical foundation for this scheme is developed and discussed in the thesis. In isolated locations linear loads constitute a significant percentage of the total load. Therefore, on the implementation front, only the compensation of fundamental negative sequence is demonstrated. One more necessity for compensating the fundamental negative sequence is that, the SRIM offers only leakage impedance to the fundamental negative sequence components resulting in high fundamental negative sequence current even for a small fundamental negative sequence voltage present at the micro-grid. The proposed scheme ensures balanced three phase currents at the SRIM windings and the full unbalanced current is provided from the stator side converter. This scheme is validated both by simulation and experimentation. The proposed power conditioner is integrated and used in the implementation of the entire wind power generation scheme that is proposed in the thesis. The maximum power point tracking of the wind power unit is also incorporated in the proposed system. The simulation and experimental results are also presented. Finally, the engineering issues involved in the implementation of the proposed scheme are discussed in detail highlighting the hardware configuration and the equipments used. The wind turbine is emulated using a chopper controlled DC motor. The shaft torque of the DC motor is controlled to give the Cp−λ characteristic of a typical windmill. The control issues of the DC machine to behave as a wind turbine are also explained. Finally the thesis is concluded by a statement of potentials and possibilities for future work in this research area.